“If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Primary source)
Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, is a powerful and introspective novel set during the Spanish Civil War. The story follows Robert Jordan, an American volunteer fighting with the anti-fascist Republican forces. As a dynamiter assigned to blow up a bridge critical to an upcoming Republican offensive, Jordan’s mission becomes a lens through which Hemingway explores themes of duty, sacrifice, love, death, and the complex nature of war.
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“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any to-morrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
Ernest Hemingway
“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Every day above earth is a good day.”
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“The years teach much which the days never know.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“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 Primary source“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“A life of leisure, and a life of laziness, are two things.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source