Ernest Hemingway Quotes

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I had an inheritance from my father,It was the moon and the sun.And though I roam all over the world,The spending of it’s never done.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I think you have more fun as a human being even though it is much more painful.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

~ Ernest Hemingway

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book.

~ Ernest Hemingway

We were no longer, technically, children although in many ways I am quite sure that we were. Childish has become a term of contempt. Don't be childish, darling. I hope to Christ I am. Don't be childish yourself. It is possible to be grateful that no one that you would willingly associate with you say, Be mature. Be well-balanced, be well-adjusted. Africa, being as old as it is, makes all people except the professional invaders and spoilers into children. No one says to anyone in Africa, Why don't you grow up? . . . Men know that they are children in relation to the country and, as in armies, seniority and senility ride close together. But to have the heart of a child is not a disgrace. It is an honor. A man must comport himself as a man. . . . But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I had try to tell the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it, as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?

~ Ernest Hemingway

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

~ Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man, true nobility is being superior to your former self.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

~ Ernest Hemingway

Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.

~ Ernest Hemingway

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after everyone else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

~ Ernest Hemingway

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grit and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, inter-breeding and the comforts of religion; the open-doored, lighted Cuban boilto houses, shacks whose only romance was their names

~ Ernest Hemingway

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' Then he added, 'Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish wonderful though he is.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The Lord is my shepherdI shall not want him for longHe maketh me to lie down in green pasturesand there are no green pasturesHe leadeth me beside still watersand still waters run deep

~ Ernest Hemingway

if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

How little we know of what there is to know.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Dear Jesus, please get me out. Christ, please, please, please, Christ. If you only keep me from being killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell everybody in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please, please, dear Jesus' The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rosa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.

~ Ernest Hemingway

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it. This may not be true but he had believed it to be true for a long time and this summer they had experienced happiness for a month now and, already, in the nights, he was lonely for it before it had ever gone away.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I felt very lonely when they were all there.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.

~ Ernest Hemingway

If my Valentine you won't be,I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.

~ Ernest Hemingway

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.

~ Ernest Hemingway

To understand is to forgive.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Never confuse movement with action.

~ Ernest Hemingway

He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

~ Ernest Hemingway

you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

~ Ernest Hemingway

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; 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