Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.
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The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.
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You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.
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Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.
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When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?
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I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
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You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
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Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.
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I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.
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Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?
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No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
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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.
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You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?
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I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.
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You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.
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What is the definition of guts? Grace under pressure.
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I am always in love.
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There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
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There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.
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I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.
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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.
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In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
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Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.
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I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.