Ernest Hemingway, an American writer known for his minimalist style and adventurous spirit, left a lasting mark on 20th-century literature. His prime creative period spanned the mid-20s to mid-50s, earning him the prestigious Nobel Prize in 1954. Despite dying young, Hemingway left behind a rich legacy including seven novels, six short story collections, and various non-fiction works, many of which are considered American literary classics. His distinct “iceberg theory” writing style and exciting lifestyle continue to inspire readers and writers alike.
Born and raised in Illinois, Ernest Hemingway’s life was marked by travel, adventure, and war. After a brief stint as a journalist, he served as an ambulance driver in WWI, an experience that deeply impacted his writing. Following his marriage and move to Paris, he immersed himself in the artistic community and penned his debut novel, “The Sun Also Rises.” Throughout his life, Hemingway married and divorced multiple times, and his turbulent personal life was reflected in his works like “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” inspired by his wartime experiences. He found homes in Key West and Cuba, and though seriously injured in plane crashes later in life, continued to travel and write. Suffering from pain and ill health, Hemingway tragically died by suicide in 1961.
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
1. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
— Ernest Hemingway
2. “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
— Ernest Hemingway
3. “Courage is grace under pressure.”
— Ernest Hemingway
4. “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
— Ernest Hemingway
5. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
— Ernest Hemingway
6. “Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything. ”
— Ernest Hemingway
7. “We’re stronger in the places that we’ve been broken.”
— Ernest Hemingway
8. “We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.”
— Ernest Hemingway
9. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
— Ernest Hemingway
10. “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
— Ernest Hemingway
11. “Write hard and clear about what hurts. ”
— Ernest Hemingway
12. “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”
— Ernest Hemingway
13. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
— Ernest Hemingway
14. “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
15. “Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.”
— Ernest Hemingway
16. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
— Ernest Hemingway
17. “Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.”
— Ernest Hemingway
18. “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
— Ernest Hemingway
19. “In order to write about life first you must live it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
20. “The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.”
— Ernest Hemingway
21. “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway
22. “The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
23. “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is.”
— Ernest Hemingway
24. “I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you’re yet to be.”
— Ernest Hemingway
25. “Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey.”
— Ernest Hemingway
26. “Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It’s been that way all this year. It’s been that way so many times. All of war is that way.”
— Ernest Hemingway
27. “I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
— Ernest Hemingway
28. “Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.”
— Ernest Hemingway
29. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
— Ernest Hemingway
30. “Write drunk; edit sober.”
— Ernest Hemingway
31. “The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
32. “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
— Ernest Hemingway
33. “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
34. “The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, and the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
— Ernest Hemingway
35. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kill. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
— Ernest Hemingway
36. “When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.”
— Ernest Hemingway
37. “Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.”
— Ernest Hemingway
38. “Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, everything will get better and the sun will shine brighter than ever.”
— Ernest Hemingway
39. “You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”
— Ernest Hemingway
40. “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
— Ernest Hemingway
41. “Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.”
— Ernest Hemingway
42. “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
— Ernest Hemingway
43. “Never mistake motion for action.”
— Ernest Hemingway
44. “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
45. “Write as well as you can and finish what you start.”
— Ernest Hemingway
46. “Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
— Ernest Hemingway
47. “To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don’t let it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
48. “Life is pain, so live it up while you can.”
— Ernest Hemingway
49. “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
— Ernest Hemingway
50. “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
51. “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
— Ernest Hemingway
52. “The only thing that can ruin a good day is people.”
— Ernest Hemingway
53. “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.”
— Ernest Hemingway
54. “Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.”
— Ernest Hemingway
55. “I drink to make other people more interesting.”
— Ernest Hemingway
56. “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”
— Ernest Hemingway
57. “I’m tired of everybody. Please forgive me.”
— Ernest Hemingway
58. “All thinking men are atheists.”
— Ernest Hemingway
59. “Man is not made for defeat.”
— Ernest Hemingway
60. “Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.”
— Ernest Hemingway
61. “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”
— Ernest Hemingway
62. “Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel…”
— Ernest Hemingway
63. “Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.”
— Ernest Hemingway
64. “The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.”
— Ernest Hemingway
65. “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”
— Ernest Hemingway
66. “A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”
— Ernest Hemingway
67. “No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”
— Ernest Hemingway
68. “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
69. “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
— Ernest Hemingway
70. “I am always in love.”
— Ernest Hemingway
71. “I never knew of a Morning in Africa when I woke up and was not happy.”
— Ernest Hemingway
72. “Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.”
— Ernest Hemingway
73. “You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.”
— Ernest Hemingway
74. “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
75. “Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.”
— Ernest Hemingway
76. “And you’ll always love me, won’t you? Yes, And the rain won’t make any difference? No.”
— Ernest Hemingway
77. “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
— Ernest Hemingway
78. “Strong in all the Broken Places.”
— Ernest Hemingway
79. “But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.”
— Ernest Hemingway
80. “Easy writing makes hard reading.”
— Ernest Hemingway
81. “Good writing is good conversation, only more so.”
— Ernest Hemingway
82. “A man does not exist until he is drunk.”
— Ernest Hemingway
83. “My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine.”
— Ernest Hemingway
84. “It’s silly not to hope. It’s a sin he thought.”
— Ernest Hemingway
85. “Humility is not disgraceful, and carries no loss of true pride.”
— Ernest Hemingway
86. “As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”
— Ernest Hemingway
87. “London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.”
— Ernest Hemingway
88. “Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.”
— Ernest Hemingway
89. “Most people never listen.”
— Ernest Hemingway
90. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
— Ernest Hemingway
91. “If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
92. “No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.”
— Ernest Hemingway
93. “My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.”
— Ernest Hemingway
94. “War is a crime. Ask the Infantry and ask the dead.”
— Ernest Hemingway
95. “The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off.”
— Ernest Hemingway
96. “Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.”
— Ernest Hemingway
97. “Every day above earth is a good day.”
— Ernest Hemingway
98. “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.”
— Ernest Hemingway
99. “I’m not brave anymore darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.”
— Ernest Hemingway
100. “Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.”
— Ernest Hemingway
101. “I decided to stop drinking with creeps. I decided to drink only with friends. I’ve lost 30 pounds.”
— Ernest Hemingway
102. “Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
— Ernest Hemingway
103. “You must be prepared to work always without applause.”
— Ernest Hemingway
104. “I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.”
— Ernest Hemingway
105. “I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye – that was the trouble – I wanted to kiss you good night – and there’s a lot of difference.”
— Ernest Hemingway
106. “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
— Ernest Hemingway
107. “Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary…”
— Ernest Hemingway
108. “The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.”
— Ernest Hemingway
109. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
— Ernest Hemingway
110. “My big fish must be somewhere.”
— Ernest Hemingway
111. “The shortest answer is doing the thing.”
— Ernest Hemingway
112. “For what are we born if not to aid one another?”
— Ernest Hemingway
113. “There are only two places in the world where we can live happily: at home and in Paris.”
— Ernest Hemingway
114. “No one you love is ever truly lost.”
— Ernest Hemingway
115. “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
116. “By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”
— Ernest Hemingway
117. “Being against evil doesn’t make you good.”
— Ernest Hemingway
118. “The smallest coffins are the heaviest.”
— Ernest Hemingway
119. “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.”
— Ernest Hemingway
120. “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
121. “The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.”
— Ernest Hemingway
122. “Work could cure almost anything.”
— Ernest Hemingway
123. “You may talk. And I may listen. And miracles might happen.”
— Ernest Hemingway
124. “How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.”
— Ernest Hemingway
125. “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”
— Ernest Hemingway
126. “You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.”
— Ernest Hemingway
127. “To be successful in writing, use short sentences.”
— Ernest Hemingway
128. “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.”
— Ernest Hemingway
129. “Every damn thing is your own fault if you are any good.”
— Ernest Hemingway
130. “No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
— Ernest Hemingway
131. “The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.”
— Ernest Hemingway
132. “I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.”
— Ernest Hemingway
133. “Religion is the opium of the poor.”
— Ernest Hemingway
134. “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
— Ernest Hemingway
135. “You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.”
— Ernest Hemingway
136. “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
— Ernest Hemingway
137. “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
— Ernest Hemingway
138. “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
— Ernest Hemingway
139. “My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”
— Ernest Hemingway
140. “When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
— Ernest Hemingway
141. “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
142. “Live it up so you can write it down.”
— Ernest Hemingway
143. “To hell with luck. I’ll bring the luck with me.”
— Ernest Hemingway
144. “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
— Ernest Hemingway
145. “Remember everything is right until it’s wrong. You’ll know when it’s wrong.”
— Ernest Hemingway
146. “You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.”
— Ernest Hemingway
147. “Time is the least thing we have.”
— Ernest Hemingway
148. “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
— Ernest Hemingway
149. “You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
150. “All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.”
— Ernest Hemingway
151. “I’m always reading books many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.”
— Ernest Hemingway
152. “I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.”
— Ernest Hemingway
153. “I had an inheritance from my father, It was the moon and the sun. And though I roam all over the world, The spending of it’s never done.”
— Ernest Hemingway
154. “I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”
— Ernest Hemingway
155. “For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.”
— Ernest Hemingway
156. “The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.”
— Ernest Hemingway
157. “The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.”
— Ernest Hemingway
158. “I don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”
— Ernest Hemingway
159. “When you have a child, the world has a hostage.”
— Ernest Hemingway
160. “The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.”
— Ernest Hemingway
161. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”
— Ernest Hemingway
162. “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
— Ernest Hemingway
163. “The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.”
— Ernest Hemingway
164. “The circus is the only fun you can buy that is good for you.”
— Ernest Hemingway
165. “In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.”
— Ernest Hemingway
166. “I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.”
— Ernest Hemingway
167. “A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee glasses, and the wet circles left by wine glasses.”
— Ernest Hemingway
168. “If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”
— Ernest Hemingway
169. “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-ninth of it being above water.”
— Ernest Hemingway
170. “I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.”
— Ernest Hemingway
171. “All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
— Ernest Hemingway
172. “Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn’t writing, doesn’t.”
— Ernest Hemingway
173. “I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.”
— Ernest Hemingway
174. “Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.”
— Ernest Hemingway
175. “Everyone behaves badly – given the chance.”
— Ernest Hemingway
176. “All things truly wicked start from innocence.”
— Ernest Hemingway
177. “To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it’s over but in a way, it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that’s rare. That’s rare and valuable.”
— Ernest Hemingway
178. “Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.”
— Ernest Hemingway
179. “Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still, a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home.”
— Ernest Hemingway
180. “No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.”
— Ernest Hemingway
181. “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
182. “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
183. “There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don’t ever tell which is which.”
— Ernest Hemingway
184. “I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”
— Ernest Hemingway
185. “French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.”
— Ernest Hemingway
186. “Once in Africa I lost the corkscrew and we were forced to live off food and water for weeks.”
— Ernest Hemingway
187. “One cat just leads to another.”
— Ernest Hemingway
188. “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after the first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cold and you warm as you write.”
— Ernest Hemingway
189. “Some people, when they hear an echo, think they originated the sound.”
— Ernest Hemingway
190. “Hunger is good discipline.”
— Ernest Hemingway
191. “Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.”
— Ernest Hemingway
192. “You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn’t any woman and there isn’t any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.”
— Ernest Hemingway
193. “When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?”
— Ernest Hemingway
194. “We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”
— Ernest Hemingway
195. “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
196. “Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.”
— Ernest Hemingway
197. “No horse named Morbid ever won a race.”
— Ernest Hemingway
198. “Love is infinitely more endurable than hate.”
— Ernest Hemingway
199. “I was blown up while we were eating cheese.”
— Ernest Hemingway
200. “Don’t do what you sincerely don’t want to do. Never confuse movement with action.”
— Ernest Hemingway
201. “It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.”
— Ernest Hemingway
202. “Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought I have such a heart too.”
— Ernest Hemingway
203. “I rewrote the ending of ‘Farewell to Arms’ 39 times before I was satisfied.”
— Ernest Hemingway
204. “How little we know of what there is to know.”
— Ernest Hemingway
205. “It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea…”
— Ernest Hemingway
206. “Before you quit, you have to try.”
— Ernest Hemingway
207. “He rested sitting on the unstepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.”
— Ernest Hemingway
208. “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
209. “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
210. “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”
— Ernest Hemingway
211. “Imagination? It is the one thing besides honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.”
— Ernest Hemingway
212. “They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life, the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”
— Ernest Hemingway
213. “The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats.”
— Ernest Hemingway
214. “Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”
— Ernest Hemingway
215. “Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”
— Ernest Hemingway
216. “Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?”
— Ernest Hemingway
217. “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway
218. “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
219. “As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.”
— Ernest Hemingway
220. “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.”
— Ernest Hemingway
221. “Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”
— Ernest Hemingway
222. “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
223. “My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.”
— Ernest Hemingway
224. “I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.”
— Ernest Hemingway
225. “Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.”
— Ernest Hemingway
226. “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
227. “The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.”
— Ernest Hemingway
228. “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
229. “Religion is like an ice-cold whiskey on a hot day.”
— Ernest Hemingway
230. “I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.”
— Ernest Hemingway
231. “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.”
— Ernest Hemingway
232. “But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.”
— Ernest Hemingway
233. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
— Ernest Hemingway
234. “You’re beautiful, like a May fly.”
— Ernest Hemingway
235. “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
236. “In a power-hungry, power worshipping society, men label themselves atheist.”
— Ernest Hemingway
237. “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 it was all about.”
— Ernest Hemingway
238. “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
— Ernest Hemingway
239. “You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?”
— Ernest Hemingway
240. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
— Ernest Hemingway
241. “Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.”
— Ernest Hemingway
242. “The bicycle riders drank much wine and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves.”
— Ernest Hemingway
243. “But did thee feel the earth move?”
— Ernest Hemingway
244. “Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.”
— Ernest Hemingway
245. “However you make your living is where your talent lies.”
— Ernest Hemingway
246. “But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”
— Ernest Hemingway
247. “Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.”
— Ernest Hemingway
248. “The cat has complete emotional honesty – an attribute not often found in humans.”
— Ernest Hemingway
249. “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 another.”
— Ernest Hemingway
250. “This beer is good for you. This is draft beer. Stick with the beer. Let’s go and beat this guy up and come back and drink some more beer.”
— Ernest Hemingway
