Quotes by Ernest Hemingway
The following are quotes from Ernest Hemingway:
'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part.
'We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports. . . all others are games.
Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.
Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . .
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Courage is grace under pressure.
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
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.
If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
Never confuse movement with action.
Never mistake motion for action.
Only that which makes you feel bad after doing is immoral.
Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.
The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly in the only heritage he has to leave.
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.
There's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility is being superior to your former self.
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.
Time is the least thing we have.
To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters. A character is a caricature.
You lose it if you talk about it.
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