Ernest Hemingway – 50 Quotes

50 Quotes by Ernest Hemingway

Courage is grace under pressure.

– Ernest Hemingway

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

– Ernest Hemingway

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

– Ernest Hemingway

In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.

– Ernest Hemingway

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

– Ernest Hemingway

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

– Ernest Hemingway

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

– Ernest Hemingway

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

– Ernest Hemingway

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

– Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

– Ernest Hemingway

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

– Ernest Hemingway

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

– Ernest Hemingway

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

– Ernest Hemingway

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

– Ernest Hemingway

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

– Ernest Hemingway

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

– Ernest Hemingway

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

– Ernest Hemingway

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

– Ernest Hemingway

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

– Ernest Hemingway

Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

– Ernest Hemingway

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.

– Ernest Hemingway

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

– Ernest Hemingway

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

– Ernest Hemingway

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

– Ernest Hemingway

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

– Ernest Hemingway

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

– Ernest Hemingway

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

– Ernest Hemingway

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

– Ernest Hemingway

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

– Ernest Hemingway

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

– Ernest Hemingway

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

– Ernest Hemingway

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

– Ernest Hemingway

If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

– Ernest Hemingway

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

– Ernest Hemingway

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

– Ernest Hemingway

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

– 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

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

– Ernest Hemingway

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

– Ernest Hemingway

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

– Ernest Hemingway

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

– Ernest Hemingway

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

– Ernest Hemingway

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

– Ernest Hemingway

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

– Ernest Hemingway

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

– Ernest Hemingway

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

– Ernest Hemingway

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

– Ernest Hemingway

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

– Ernest Hemingway

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

– Ernest Hemingway

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

– Ernest Hemingway