“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Every day above earth is a good day.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I have no luck anymore. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” she said. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Where should we go? I don’t care. Anywhere you want. Anywhere we don’t know people.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Grace under pressure.”
— Ernest Hemingway Secondary source“Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“This is a hell of a dull talk,” Brett said. “How about some of that champagne?”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“No animal has more liberty than the cat; but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. 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 Primary source“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. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend to you a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“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. It you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source’I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Wine is a grand thing,” I said. “It makes you forget all the bad.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“You ought to dream. All our biggest business men have been dreamers.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“No, that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
— Ernest Hemingway 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“I wish we had horses to ride,” Maria said. “In my happiness I would like to be on a good horse and ride fast with thee riding fast beside me and we would ride faster and faster, galloping, and never pass my happiness.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I’m not unfaithful, darling. I’ve plenty of faults but I’m very faithful. You’ll be sick of me I’ll be so faithful.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not completely trust anyone.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“My God what would a man do with a woman like that except worship her?”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“You expected to be sad in the fall. 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. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“War is no longer made by simply analysed 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 Primary source”You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“You know I don’t love any one but you. You shouldn’t mind because some one else loved me.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Spanish girls make wonderful wives. I’ve never had one so I know.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“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 Primary source“Work could cure almost anything.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“It is a good thing to have a brave man [JFK] as our President in times as tough as these are for our country and the world.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“But are there not many fascists in your country?”
“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes.”
“But you cannot destroy them until they rebel?”
“No,” Robert Jordan said. “We cannot destroy them. But we can educate the people so that they will fear fascism and recognize it as it appears and combat it.”
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
“He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“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 Primary source“It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. 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 Primary source“It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“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 Primary source“There isn’t always an explanation for everything.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“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 Primary source“He killed more people than the cholera”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“That I am a foreigner is not my fault. I would rather have been born here.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“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 Primary source“My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren’t with me I haven’t a thing in the world.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“This is a good place,” he said.
“There’s a lot of liquor,” I agreed.
“It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“You had to trust the people you worked with completely or not at all, and you had to make decisions about the trusting.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry.”
— Ernest Hemingway Disputed“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It’s been that way all this year. It’s been that way so many times. All of this war is that way.”
— 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“I may not be as strong as I think. But I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“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 Primary source“And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long planned murder. For 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 Primary source“I know that 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 Primary source“This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Good. I go. And if thou dost not love me, I love thee enough for both.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Are you a communist?”
“No, I am an anti-fascist.”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.”
“Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I am always in love.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“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 Primary source“I don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Now when a country does not pay its debts you cannot take its word on anything.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary sourceIan Fleming William Blake George Orwell Thomas Edison Franklin D. Roosevelt