Top 500 Ernest Hemingway Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled...”

— Ernest Hemingway

402. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.”

— Ernest Hemingway

403. “I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”

— Ernest Hemingway

404. “Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.”

— Ernest Hemingway

405. “No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.”

— Ernest Hemingway

406. “That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

— Ernest Hemingway

407. “Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long.”

— Ernest Hemingway

408. “You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”

— Ernest Hemingway

409. “We wait always for something that does not come.”

— Ernest Hemingway

410. “He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

412. “I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation.”

— Ernest Hemingway

413. “Don’t you like to write letters? I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.”

— Ernest Hemingway

414. “Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.”

— Ernest Hemingway

415. “Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.”

— Ernest Hemingway

416. “When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”

— Ernest Hemingway

417. “I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”

— Ernest Hemingway

418. “I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.”

— Ernest Hemingway

419. “The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.”

— Ernest Hemingway

420. “In war, one cannot say what one feels.”

— Ernest Hemingway

421. “For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.”

— Ernest Hemingway

422. “There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.”

— Ernest Hemingway

423. “Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

— Ernest Hemingway

424. “Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you’ve seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That’s good practice, but it isn’t creative writing.”

— Ernest Hemingway

425. “In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.”

— Ernest Hemingway

426. “Summer is a discouraging time to work – you don’t feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.”

— Ernest Hemingway

427. “She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.”

— Ernest Hemingway

428. “This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

429. “You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

— Ernest Hemingway

430. “There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.”

— Ernest Hemingway

431. “No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.”

— Ernest Hemingway

432. “I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.”

— Ernest Hemingway

433. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

434. “He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.”

— Ernest Hemingway

435. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

436. “It’s all nonsense. It’s only nonsense. I’m not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn’t.”

— Ernest Hemingway

437. “As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Ernest Hemingway

439. “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.”

— Ernest Hemingway

440. “This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

441. “Life is the best left hooker I ever saw, although some say it was Charlie White of Chicago.”

— Ernest Hemingway

442. “A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.”

— Ernest Hemingway

443. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

444. “Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.”

— Ernest Hemingway

445. “But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”

— Ernest Hemingway

446. “The only decent bone in her body was mine.”

— Ernest Hemingway

447. “I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn’t.”

— Ernest Hemingway

448. “I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.”

— Ernest Hemingway

449. “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

— Ernest Hemingway

450. “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.”

— Ernest Hemingway