Never mistake motion for action.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Mistakes, Action
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
Topics: War
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
—Ernest Hemingway
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
Topics: Politics
They can’t yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
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
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
Topics: Perseverance, Endurance, Resolve
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
—Ernest Hemingway
You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.
—Ernest Hemingway
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Anxiety, Cowardice, Courage, Fear
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
Topics: Learning
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Morals, Morality
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and the afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and places and how the weather was.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books, Literature, Reading
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
Topics: Books, Literature
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Doubt, Uncertainty
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
Topics: Morality, Morals, Simple Living, Simplicity
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.
—Ernest Hemingway
Life breaks us all, but afterwards, many of us are strongest at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
—Ernest Hemingway
All thinking men are atheists.
—Ernest Hemingway
I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
—Ernest Hemingway
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