Top 500 Ernest Hemingway Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Don’t do what you sincerely don’t want to do. Never confuse movement with action.”

— Ernest Hemingway

202. “It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.”

— Ernest Hemingway

203. “Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”

— Ernest Hemingway

204. “I rewrote the ending of ‘Farewell to Arms’ 39 times before I was satisfied.”

— Ernest Hemingway

205. “How little we know of what there is to know.”

— Ernest Hemingway

206. “It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea...”

— Ernest Hemingway

207. “In a power hungry, power worshipping society, men label themselves atheist.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

209. “He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.”

— Ernest Hemingway

210. “But did thee feel the earth move?”

— Ernest Hemingway

211. “You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.”

— Ernest Hemingway

212. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

213. “However you make your living is where your talent lies.”

— Ernest Hemingway

214. “Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.”

— Ernest Hemingway

215. “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”

— Ernest Hemingway

216. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

217. “The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats.”

— Ernest Hemingway

218. “Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”

— Ernest Hemingway

219. “Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?”

— Ernest Hemingway

220. “Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

222. “Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

224. “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.”

— Ernest Hemingway

225. “Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”

— Ernest Hemingway

226. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

227. “My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.”

— Ernest Hemingway

228. “I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.”

— Ernest Hemingway

229. “Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.”

— Ernest Hemingway

230. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

231. “The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.”

— Ernest Hemingway

232. “When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.”

— Ernest Hemingway

233. “I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.”

— Ernest Hemingway

234. “Religion is like an ice cold whiskey on a hot day.”

— Ernest Hemingway

235. “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.”

— Ernest Hemingway

236. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

— Ernest Hemingway

237. “Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it’s not much use.”

— Ernest Hemingway

238. “But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.”

— Ernest Hemingway

239. “You’re beautiful, like a May fly.”

— Ernest Hemingway

240. “Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.”

— Ernest Hemingway

241. “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.”

— Ernest Hemingway

242. “You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

245. “Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.”

— Ernest Hemingway

246. “But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

248. “The cat has complete emotional honesty – an attribute not often found in humans.”

— Ernest Hemingway

249. “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 another.”

— Ernest Hemingway

250. “This beer is good for you. This is draft beer. Stick with the beer. Let’s go and beat this guy up and come back and drink some more beer.”

— Ernest Hemingway