Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know, you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.

Ernest Hemingway
The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

Ernest Hemingway
'What happens to people that love each other?'
'I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.'

Ernest Hemingway
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

Ernest Hemingway
The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

Ernest Hemingway
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Ernest Hemingway
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

Ernest Hemingway
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.

Ernest Hemingway
There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

Ernest Hemingway
I'm not advocating the strenuous life for everyone or trying to say it's the choice form of life. Anyone who's had the luck or misfortune to be an athlete has to keep his body in shape. The body and mind are closely coordinated. Fattening of the body can lead to fattening of the mind. I would be tempted to say that it can lead to fattening of the soul, but I don't know anything about the soul.

Ernest Hemingway
You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

Ernest Hemingway
I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

Ernest Hemingway
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway
'Why, you sad son-of-a-bitch, how can you be so cocky and stand there and block cars when you're nothing but a miserable bear and a black bear at that - not even a polar or a grizzly or anything worth while.'

Ernest Hemingway
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Ernest Hemingway
The rich were dull and they drank too much.... He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money.

Ernest Hemingway
He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

Ernest Hemingway
Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions.

Ernest Hemingway
That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.

Ernest Hemingway
You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.

Ernest Hemingway
In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

Ernest Hemingway
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.

Ernest Hemingway
They can't yank novelist like they can pitcher. Novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Ernest Hemingway
Red Dog smiled. 'I would like you to meet my friends Mr Sitting Bull, Mr Poisoned Buffalo, and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards.'
'Sitting Bull's a name I know,' Yogi remarked, shaking hands.
'Oh, I'm not one of those Sitting Bulls,' Mr Sitting Bull said.

Ernest Hemingway
Never fall in love?" "Always," said the count. "I am always in love.

Ernest Hemingway