50 Quotes From Ernest Hemingway About Life

1. The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
2. The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
3. But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
4. There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
5. I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
6. Courage is grace under pressure.
7. An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
8. 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.
9. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
10. 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.
11. Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
12. Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
13. Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
14. Never mistake motion for action.
15. All things truly wicked start from innocence.
16. If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
17. I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. There is no friend as loyal as a book.
21. We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
22. Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
23. When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
24. 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.
25. When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. 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.
30. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
31. Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.
32. The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
36. 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.
37. 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.
38. The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
39. All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
40. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
41. Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
42. I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
43. In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
44. Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
45. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
46. Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
47. As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
48. All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
49. You're beautiful, like a May fly.
50. My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.