Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Ernest Hemingway
The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one'.... (The man who first said that) was probably a coward.... He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.

Ernest Hemingway
I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way.

Ernest Hemingway
Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.

Ernest Hemingway
I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.

Ernest Hemingway
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.

Ernest Hemingway
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

Ernest Hemingway
Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.

Ernest Hemingway
The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.

Ernest Hemingway
I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.

Ernest Hemingway
Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.

Ernest Hemingway
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

Ernest Hemingway
I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Ernest Hemingway
Personal columnists … are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him.

Ernest Hemingway
No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.

Ernest Hemingway
Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Ernest Hemingway
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

Ernest Hemingway
That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery

Ernest Hemingway
The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.

Ernest Hemingway
If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.

Ernest Hemingway
He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

Ernest Hemingway
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Ernest Hemingway
What did I know best that I had not written about
and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?

Ernest Hemingway
When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.

Ernest Hemingway
You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me.

Ernest Hemingway
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

Ernest Hemingway
The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Ernest Hemingway
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Ernest Hemingway
I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world—or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)

Ernest Hemingway