Ernest Hemingway Quotes

"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."

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

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

"Never go on trips with anyone you do not love."

"In order to write about life first you must live it."

"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life."

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."

"So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

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

"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools."

"The first draft of anything is shit."

"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."

"When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead."

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

"As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."

"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."

"The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it."

"Don't bother with churches, government buildings or city squares. If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars."

"The fear of death increases in exact proportion to the increase in wealth."

"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."

"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."

"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters."

"The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."

"Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another."

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing."

"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."

"Worry destroys the ability to write."

"Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is."

"The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

"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."

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."

"Courage is grace under pressure."