Ernest Hemingway - Thought Quotes

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Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler.
This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that.

Ernest Hemingway
He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run... but thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.

Ernest Hemingway
We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

Ernest Hemingway
You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.

Ernest Hemingway
I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.

Ernest Hemingway
He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

Ernest Hemingway
Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

Ernest Hemingway
I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen.

Ernest Hemingway
Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.

Ernest Hemingway
And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

Ernest Hemingway
A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.

Ernest Hemingway
I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.

Ernest Hemingway
You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

Ernest Hemingway
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

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

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

Ernest Hemingway
I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn't until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris, that the other thing started again.

Ernest Hemingway
For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.

Ernest Hemingway
This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.

Ernest Hemingway
He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

Ernest Hemingway
How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.

Ernest Hemingway
Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.

Ernest Hemingway
My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.

Ernest Hemingway
I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

Ernest Hemingway