Top 100 Ernest Hemingway, Quotes
#1. THE GAMBLER,THE NUN,& THE RADIO
Tonight, sent by the police, they come to serenade me.He laughed, then tapped his stomach.-I cannot laugh yet. As musicians they are fatal
Ernest Hemingway,
#2. Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.
Ernest Hemingway,
#4. A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.
Ernest Hemingway,
#5. Listen," I told him. "Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.
Ernest Hemingway,
#6. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#7. There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#8. I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you
Ernest Hemingway,
#9. Nicholas Adams drove on through the town along the empty, brick-paved street ... on under the heavy trees of the small town that are a part of your heart if it is your town and you have walked under them, but that are only too heavy, that shut out the sun and that dampen the houses for a stranger.
Ernest Hemingway,
#10. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#11. The colonel breakfasted with the leisure of a fighter who has been clipped badly, hears four, and knows how to relax truly for five seconds or more.
Ernest Hemingway,
#13. The cynical ones are the best companions. But the best of all are the cynical ones when they are still devout; or after; when having been devout, then cynical, they become devout again by cynicism.
Ernest Hemingway,
#14. Besides, I'm not jealous. I'm just so in love with you that there isn't anything else.
Ernest Hemingway,
#15. 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,
#16. We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete.
Ernest Hemingway,
#17. I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.
Ernest Hemingway,
#18. But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like nothing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.
Ernest Hemingway,
#19. The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull.
Ernest Hemingway,
#20. There is no such word as love. Just as there is no word for sorry.
Ernest Hemingway,
#21. Yes," said Wilson. "There's that. Doesn't do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away. No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much.
Ernest Hemingway,
#25. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.
Ernest Hemingway,
#27. Understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#29. It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. Then he was sorry for the great fish ... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.
Ernest Hemingway,
#31. 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,
#32. 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,
#33. But even if I never bought any more clothing ever," I said, "I wouldn't have enough money to buy the Picassos that I want.
Ernest Hemingway,
#35. 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,
#36. There is a hollow empty feeling that a man can have when he is waked too early in the morning that is almost like the feeling of disaster and he had this multiplied a thousand times.
Ernest Hemingway,
#37. When you have been concentrating so hard on something you can't stop and your brain gets to racing like a fly-wheel with the weight gone. You'd better just not think.
Ernest Hemingway,
#38. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.
Ernest Hemingway,
#39. This is a hell of dull talk ... How about some of that champagne?
Ernest Hemingway,
#40. 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,
#41. But people do. They love each other and they misunderstand on purpose and they fight and then suddenly they aren't the same one.
Ernest Hemingway,
#42. In a snowstorm it always seemed, for a time, as though there were no enemies.
Ernest Hemingway,
#43. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that,
Ernest Hemingway,
#44. [Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)
Ernest Hemingway,
#45. In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.
Ernest Hemingway,
#46. You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway,
#47. A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
Ernest Hemingway,
#49. You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.
Ernest Hemingway,
#50. After the New Yorker piece I decided that I would never give another interview to anyone on any subject and that I would keep away from all places where I would be likely to be interviewed. If you say nothing it is difficult for someone to get it wrong.
Ernest Hemingway,
#51. Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more.
Ernest Hemingway,
#54. I would not wish to bring either a son or a daughter into this world as this world is. And also you take all the love I have to give
Ernest Hemingway,
#55. When she goes, he though. I'll have all I want. Not all I want but all there is
Ernest Hemingway,
#57. Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well
Ernest Hemingway,
#58. I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.
Ernest Hemingway,
#59. What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
Ernest Hemingway,
#60. Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.
Ernest Hemingway,
#61. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter.
Ernest Hemingway,
#62. But, thank God, [the fish] are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.
Ernest Hemingway,
#63. Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.
Ernest Hemingway,
#64. If my Valentine you won't be,
I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.
Ernest Hemingway,
#65. THE GAMBLER,THE NUN & THE RADIO
I do not follow you.
Many times I do not follow myself with pleasure.
Ernest Hemingway,
#67. When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you ... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
Ernest Hemingway,
#69. The hell with my arm. You lose an arm you lose an arm. There's worse things than lose an arm. You've got two arms and you've got two of something else. And a man's still a man with one arm or with one of those. The hell with it,' he says ... after a minute he says, 'I got those other two still.
Ernest Hemingway,
#70. Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.
Ernest Hemingway,
#72. I told the boy I was a strange old man," he said. "Now is when I must prove it." The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again.
Ernest Hemingway,
#73. You did not have to like it because you understood it. He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care
Ernest Hemingway,
#74. I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.
Ernest Hemingway,
#75. I can't say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home.
Ernest Hemingway,
#76. I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?
Ernest Hemingway,
#77. To hell with the Church when it becomes a State and the hell with the State when it becomes a Church.
Ernest Hemingway,
#79. Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.
Ernest Hemingway,
#80. 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,
#81. 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,
#82. It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.
Ernest Hemingway,
#83. How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.
Ernest Hemingway,
#85. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
Ernest Hemingway,
#87. He could see the fish and he had only to look at his hands and feel his back against the stern to know that this had truly happened and was not a dream.
Ernest Hemingway,
#88. The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
Ernest Hemingway,
#89. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.
Ernest Hemingway,
#91. The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.
Ernest Hemingway,
#92. A valuable thing too is never to let anyone know how fine you thought anyone else ever was because they know better and no one was ever that splendid.
Ernest Hemingway,
#93. I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#94. To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, ... to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.
Ernest Hemingway,
#95. I'll kill him though,' he said. 'In all his greatness and his glory.
Ernest Hemingway,
#96. Must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad. After
Ernest Hemingway,
#98. This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.
Ernest Hemingway,
#99. 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,
#100. 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,
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
