Ernest Hemingway quotes:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Courage is grace under pressure.

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.

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.

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

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.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

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.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

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.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

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.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

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

Man is not made for defeat.

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

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

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did notcompletely trust anyone.

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.

I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us.

Named Harris, Bill said. Ever know him, Mike? He was in the war, too.Fortunate fellow, Mike said. What times we had. How I wish those dear days were back.

Why must man not marry? He cannot marry. He cannot marry, he said angrily. If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose.

But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like nothing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.

Are you a communist?No I am an anti-fascistFor a long time?Since I have understood fascism.

It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I'm not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.' She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

Let us sleep," he said and he felt the long light body, warm against him, comforting against him, abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulders and of feet, making an alliance against death with him.

For her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color."- Ernest Hemingway,

The professor at the boxing gymnasium wore mustaches and was very precise and jerky and went all to pieces if you started after him.

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.

The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

I had an inheritance from my father,It was the moon and the sun.And though I roam all over the world,The spending of it's never done."

He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone"

Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.

Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.

Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.

Never mistake motion for action.

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain.

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

I drink to make other people more interesting.

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

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.

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

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

Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish.

A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.

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

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

In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.

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

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

Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."

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

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.

The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

My big fish must be somewhere.

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.

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.

The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire.

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

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.

(World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

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

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

You must hold hard to life and do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit?s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit?s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.

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.

I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time...

The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.

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

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

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.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

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.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of the country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

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

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

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.