Top 824 Quotes & Sayings by Ernest Hemingway
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Ernest Hemingway.
Last updated on April 13, 2025.
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.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
Time is the least thing we have of.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
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.
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.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
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.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
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.
Courage is grace under pressure.
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
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.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
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.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
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.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
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.
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.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
You're beautiful, like a May fly.
For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
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.
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.
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.
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.
I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.
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.
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.
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.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
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.
Never mistake motion for action.
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.
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