Ernest Hemingway quotes

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

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

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

The first draft of anything is shit.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

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

I drink to make other people more interesting.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

All thinking men are atheists.

Courage is grace under pressure.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

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.

But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Never confuse movement with action.

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

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

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.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.