110+ Ernest Hemingway Quotes On Writing, War And Cats

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for his novel The Old Man and the Sea. He is known for his economical and understated style which had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ernest Hemingway on love, writing, war.

Top 10 Ernest Hemingway Quotes

1. Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
2. Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.
3. You must always be willing to work without applause.
4. It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
5. The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
6. I drink to make other people more interesting.
7. The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
8. I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
9. We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.
10. Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

Ernest Hemingway Image Quotes

You must always be willing to work without applause. — Ernest Hemingway

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. — Ernest Hemingway

I drink to make other people more interesting. — Ernest Hemingway

We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in. — Ernest Hemingway

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love. — Ernest Hemingway

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. — Ernest Hemingway

The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. — Ernest Hemingway

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. — Ernest Hemingway

Courage is grace under pressure. — Ernest Hemingway

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know? — Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. — Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway

I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone. — Ernest Hemingway

Never mistake motion for action. — Ernest Hemingway

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age. — Ernest Hemingway

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering. — Ernest Hemingway

All things truly wicked start from an innocence. — Ernest Hemingway

Never confuse movement with action. — Ernest Hemingway

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Short Quotes

• Being against evil doesn't make you good.
• The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.
• Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.
• Courage is grace under pressure.
• The echoes of beauty you've seen transpire, Resound through dying coals of a campfire.
• 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.
• I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.
• Never mistake motion for action.
• Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Love

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. — Ernest Hemingway

I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you're yet to be. — Ernest Hemingway

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love. — Ernest Hemingway

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know? — Ernest Hemingway

we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. — Ernest Hemingway

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. — Ernest Hemingway

Wine ... offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased. — Ernest Hemingway

I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before. — Ernest Hemingway

No one you love is ever truly lost. — Ernest Hemingway

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Writing

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. — Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. — Ernest Hemingway

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. — Ernest Hemingway

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. — Ernest Hemingway

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied. — Ernest Hemingway

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

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. — Ernest Hemingway

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About War

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

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. — Ernest Hemingway

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes. — Ernest Hemingway

The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale. — Ernest Hemingway

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

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers. — Ernest Hemingway

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

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason. — Ernest Hemingway

To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material. — Ernest Hemingway

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Life

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything. — Ernest Hemingway

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. — Ernest Hemingway

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. — Ernest Hemingway

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. — Ernest Hemingway

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual. — Ernest Hemingway

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it. — Ernest Hemingway

Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. — Ernest Hemingway

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters. — Ernest Hemingway

Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, every thing will get better and sun will shine brighter then ever. — Ernest Hemingway

My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Cats

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist. — Ernest Hemingway

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not. — Ernest Hemingway

One cat just leads to another. — Ernest Hemingway

The cat has complete emotional honesty - an attribute not often found in humans. — Ernest Hemingway

One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time. — Ernest Hemingway

One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).] — Ernest Hemingway

A cat has absolute honesty. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Travel

Ronda is the place where to go, if you are planning to travel to Spain for a honeymoon or for being with a girlfriend. The whole city and its surroundings are a romantic set. ... Nice promenades, good wine, excellent food, nothing to do. — Ernest Hemingway

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up. — Ernest Hemingway

Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly. — Ernest Hemingway

How lazily the sun goes down in Granada, it hides beneath the water, it conceals in the Alhambra! — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Death

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

The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one'.... (The man who first said that) was probably a coward.... He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them. — Ernest Hemingway

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth. — Ernest Hemingway

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death. — Ernest Hemingway

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

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. — Ernest Hemingway

It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her. — Ernest Hemingway

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

Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her — Ernest Hemingway

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Africa

Once in Africa I lost the corkscrew and we were forced to live off food and water for weeks. — Ernest Hemingway

I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy. — Ernest Hemingway

Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Fishing

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for. — Ernest Hemingway

Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends. — Ernest Hemingway

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl. — Ernest Hemingway

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more? — Ernest Hemingway

My big fish must be somewhere. — Ernest Hemingway

I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand. — Ernest Hemingway

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

Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too? — Ernest Hemingway

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things — Ernest Hemingway

There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Write

Write drunk; edit sober. — Ernest Hemingway

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

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book. — Ernest Hemingway

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention. — Ernest Hemingway

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl. — Ernest Hemingway

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal. — Ernest Hemingway

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

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective — Ernest Hemingway

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better. — Ernest Hemingway

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Writer

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

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. — Ernest Hemingway

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed. — Ernest Hemingway

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. — Ernest Hemingway

He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human. — Ernest Hemingway

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood. — Ernest Hemingway

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. — Ernest Hemingway

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. — Ernest Hemingway

The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs. — Ernest Hemingway

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 the other. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Quotes About People

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. — Ernest Hemingway

I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. — Ernest Hemingway

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. — Ernest Hemingway

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

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

God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. — Ernest Hemingway

Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs. — Ernest Hemingway

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

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together — Ernest Hemingway

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other. — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Famous Quotes And Sayings

You must always be willing to work without applause. — Ernest Hemingway

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. — Ernest Hemingway

I drink to make other people more interesting. — Ernest Hemingway

We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in. — Ernest Hemingway

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love. — Ernest Hemingway

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. — Ernest Hemingway

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule. — Ernest Hemingway

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. — Ernest Hemingway

Courage is grace under pressure. — Ernest Hemingway

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know? — Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. — Ernest Hemingway

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

Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games. — Ernest Hemingway

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games. — Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway

I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone. — Ernest Hemingway

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. — Ernest Hemingway

Never mistake motion for action. — Ernest Hemingway

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

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. — Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. — Ernest Hemingway

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age. — Ernest Hemingway

To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it. — Ernest Hemingway

America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds. — Ernest Hemingway

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. — Ernest Hemingway

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering. — Ernest Hemingway

All things truly wicked start from an innocence. — Ernest Hemingway

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit?s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit?s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there. — Ernest Hemingway

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. — Ernest Hemingway

Develop a built-in bullshit detector. — Ernest Hemingway

Never confuse movement with action. — Ernest Hemingway

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. — Ernest Hemingway

Fascism is a lie told by bullies. — Ernest Hemingway

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

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist. — Ernest Hemingway

He remembered poor Julian [actually F. Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money." — Ernest Hemingway

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 and the only heritage he has to leave. — Ernest Hemingway

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. — Ernest Hemingway

I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me. — Ernest Hemingway

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting. — Ernest Hemingway

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is — Ernest Hemingway

All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones. — Ernest Hemingway

Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey — Ernest Hemingway

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work. — Ernest Hemingway

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

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

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. — Ernest Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. — Ernest Hemingway

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. — Ernest Hemingway

Religion is the opium of the poor. — Ernest Hemingway

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward. — Ernest Hemingway

What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. — Ernest Hemingway

An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead. — Ernest Hemingway

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

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. — Ernest Hemingway

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him. — Ernest Hemingway

The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats. — Ernest Hemingway

You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers. — Ernest Hemingway

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

A bottle of wine was good company. — Ernest Hemingway

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. — Ernest Hemingway

You must be prepared to work always without applause. — Ernest Hemingway

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

Life Lessons by Ernest Hemingway

1. Ernest Hemingway taught us that life is about taking risks and embracing uncertainty, as he wrote about characters who faced difficult challenges and overcame them.
2. He also showed us that life is about living in the moment and savoring the little things, as he often wrote about the beauty of nature and the joys of simple pleasures.
3. Lastly, Hemingway taught us that life is about finding our own unique voice and telling our own stories, as he wrote with a distinct style that was all his own.