Ernest Hemingway Quotes I

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Ernest Hemingway

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
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

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

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway

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

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
Ernest Hemingway

All things truly wicked start from innocence.
Ernest Hemingway

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Ernest Hemingway

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

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
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

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway

Courage is grace under pressure.
Ernest Hemingway

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

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
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

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

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

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

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.
Ernest Hemingway

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway

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

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

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
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

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 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

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

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

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
Ernest Hemingway

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
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

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

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

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

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