Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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

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

Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. Traveling third class on the train was not expensive. The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

~ Ernest Hemingway

My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. I t was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern I talian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places.Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monvel illustrations and had a very hooked nose. She was working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked on this and saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. She made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making. Afterwards she explained to me that she always talked to the wives. The wives, my wife and I felt, were tolerated. But we liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. They seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good, well-mannered and promising children and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married - time would fix that - and when my wife invited them to tea, they accepted.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. 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 wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Hem, you know I don't think that owner's wife where you live likes me. She wouldn't let me wait upstairs for you.''I'll tell her,' I said.'Don't bother. I can always wait here. It's very pleasant in the sun now, isn't it?''It's fall now,' I said. 'I don't think you dress warmly enough.''It's only cool in the evening,' Evan said. 'I'll wear my coat.''Do you know where it is?''No. But it's somewhere safe.''How do you know?''Because I left the poem in it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.

~ 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

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

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

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

~ 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

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

~ Ernest Hemingway

Man is not made for defeat.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

~ Ernest Hemingway

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

~ Ernest Hemingway

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

~ 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

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Never mistake motion for action.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

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

~ 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

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

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.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

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 always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

~ Ernest Hemingway

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

~ Ernest Hemingway

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Courage is grace under pressure.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

~ Ernest Hemingway