Top 500 Ernest Hemingway Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

— Ernest Hemingway

102. “You must be prepared to work always without applause.”

— Ernest Hemingway

103. “Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.”

— Ernest Hemingway

104. “I decided to stop drinking with creeps. I decided to drink only with friends. I’ve lost 30 pounds.”

— Ernest Hemingway

105. “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. There’s nothing to that.”

— Ernest Hemingway

106. “I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.”

— Ernest Hemingway

107. “I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye – that was the trouble – I wanted to kiss you good night – and there’s a lot of difference.”

— Ernest Hemingway

108. “Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary...”

— Ernest Hemingway

109. “The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.”

— Ernest Hemingway

110. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

— Ernest Hemingway

111. “There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”

— Ernest Hemingway

112. “Every damn thing is your own fault, if you are any good.”

— Ernest Hemingway

113. “My big fish must be somewhere.”

— Ernest Hemingway

114. “The smallest coffins are the heaviest.”

— Ernest Hemingway

115. “For what are we born if not to aid one another?”

— Ernest Hemingway

116. “You may talk. And I may listen. And miracles might happen.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

118. “How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.”

— Ernest Hemingway

119. “No one you love is ever truly lost.”

— Ernest Hemingway

120. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

121. “By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

— Ernest Hemingway

122. “Being against evil doesn’t make you good.”

— Ernest Hemingway

123. “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

124. “No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

— Ernest Hemingway

125. “The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.”

— Ernest Hemingway

126. “Work could cure almost anything.”

— Ernest Hemingway

127. “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”

— Ernest Hemingway

128. “You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

131. “To be successful in writing, use short sentences.”

— Ernest Hemingway

132. “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.”

— Ernest Hemingway

133. “You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.”

— Ernest Hemingway

134. “The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

136. “My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

— Ernest Hemingway

137. “Religion is the opium of the poor.”

— Ernest Hemingway

138. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

139. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

140. “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

— Ernest Hemingway

141. “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

— Ernest Hemingway

142. “When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

— Ernest Hemingway

143. “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

144. “Live it up so you can write it down.”

— Ernest Hemingway

145. “To hell with luck. I’ll bring the luck with me.”

— Ernest Hemingway

146. “Remember everything is right until it’s wrong. You’ll know when it’s wrong.”

— Ernest Hemingway

147. “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

— Ernest Hemingway

148. “You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.”

— Ernest Hemingway

149. “Time is the least thing we have.”

— Ernest Hemingway

150. “You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it.”

— Ernest Hemingway