Top 500 Ernest Hemingway Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.”

— Ernest Hemingway

152. “I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.”

— Ernest Hemingway

153. “I’m always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.”

— Ernest Hemingway

154. “The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

155. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

156. “If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

— Ernest Hemingway

157. “For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.”

— Ernest Hemingway

158. “I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”

— Ernest Hemingway

159. “The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.”

— Ernest Hemingway

160. “I don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”

— Ernest Hemingway

161. “When you have a child, the world has a hostage.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

163. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

— Ernest Hemingway

164. “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”

— Ernest Hemingway

165. “The circus is the only fun you can buy that is good for you.”

— Ernest Hemingway

166. “The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.”

— Ernest Hemingway

167. “All things truly wicked start from innocence.”

— Ernest Hemingway

168. “In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.”

— Ernest Hemingway

169. “I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.”

— Ernest Hemingway

170. “A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.”

— Ernest Hemingway

171. “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after the first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cold and you warm as you write.”

— Ernest Hemingway

172. “Hunger is good discipline.”

— Ernest Hemingway

173. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

174. “I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.”

— Ernest Hemingway

175. “All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”

— Ernest Hemingway

176. “Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn’t writing, doesn’t.”

— Ernest Hemingway

177. “I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.”

— Ernest Hemingway

178. “You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn’t any woman and there isn’t any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.”

— Ernest Hemingway

179. “Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.”

— Ernest Hemingway

180. “Everyone behaves badly – given the chance.”

— Ernest Hemingway

181. “Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.”

— Ernest Hemingway

182. “To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it’s over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that’s rare. That’s rare and valuable.”

— Ernest Hemingway

183. “No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.”

— Ernest Hemingway

184. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

185. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

186. “I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

— Ernest Hemingway

187. “There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don’t ever tell which is which.”

— Ernest Hemingway

188. “French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.”

— Ernest Hemingway

189. “Once in Africa I lost the corkscrew and we were forced to live off food and water for weeks.”

— Ernest Hemingway

190. “Before you quit, you have to try.”

— Ernest Hemingway

191. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

192. “One cat just leads to another.”

— Ernest Hemingway

193. “Some people, when they hear an echo, think they originated the sound.”

— Ernest Hemingway

194. “Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.”

— Ernest Hemingway

195. “When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?”

— Ernest Hemingway

196. “We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”

— Ernest Hemingway

197. “If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.”

— Ernest Hemingway

198. “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”

— Ernest Hemingway

199. “As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.”

— Ernest Hemingway

200. “Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.”

— Ernest Hemingway