Ernest Hemingway Quotes

• "A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
• "All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."
• "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
• "All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
• "All our words from loose using have lost their edge."
• "All things truly wicked start from an innocence."
• "All things truly wicked start from innocence."
• "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
• "An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools."
• "As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."
• "But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
• "Courage is grace under pressure."
• "Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination."
• "Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination."
• "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."
• "Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object."
• "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."
• "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."
• "For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive."
• "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."
• "God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers."
• "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
• "Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age."
• "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."
• "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."
• "I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight."
• "I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true."
• "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."
• "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."
• "I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen."
• "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
• "I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me."
• "I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't."
• "I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy."
• "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."
• "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."
• "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."
• "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."
• "In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. 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."
• "In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason."
• "It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."
• "Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."
• "Man is not made for defeat."
• "My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
• "Never go on trips with anyone you do not love."
• "Never mistake motion for action."
• "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
• "No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one."
• "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."
• "Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock.""
• "Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something."
• "Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him."
• "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."
• "Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre."
• "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."
• "That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."
• "The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin."
• "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."
• "The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green."
• "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."
• "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 shortest answer is doing the thing."
• "The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale."
• "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places."
• "There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are simple things, and because it takes a man's life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."
• "There is no friend as loyal as a book."
• "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."
• "There's no one thing that is true. They're all true."
• "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."
• "This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste."
• "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."
• "Wars are caused by undefended wealth."
• "What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
• "When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea."
• "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."
• "Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?"
• "You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself."
• "You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer."
• "You're beautiful, like a May fly."