Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

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

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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

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

I drink to make other people more interesting.

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

I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you're yet to be.

Being against evil doesn't make you good.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.

The echoes of beauty you've seen transpire, Resound through dying coals of a campfire.

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

The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found.

Courage is grace under pressure.

Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home.

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.

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

Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.

You may talk. And I may listen. And miracles might happen.

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.

I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.

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.

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

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.

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

Never mistake motion for action.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.

Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games.

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.

America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

How lazily the sun goes down in Granada, it hides beneath the water, it conceals in the Alhambra!

To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

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.

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.