Top Ernest Hemingway Quotes: Get Inspired and Get to Write

Top 50 Ernest Hemingway Quotes: Get Inspired and Get to Write

Ernest Hemingway Quotes: Why does art comes through pain? Why a best art work always done in pain? Why is it so? Why is it so? In this post we are going to cover for you top Ernest Hemingway quotes, which you would really love to read. They could change your perspective on life. Perhaps writers write those things that they could not do or wanted to do, or they write those things that they have lived completely. It is mere a thought, not a judgement!

Who was Ernest Hemingway? And his inspirational quotes.

We always have to say this but Ernest Hemingway was one of the best American writers who hugely contributed to American literature. His complete name was Ernest Miller Hemingway. He was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He was not only a writer. It was his later life’s role. He had played many roles in his life professionally. He was a journalist foremost, sportsman, short story writer and novelist; in the starting of his life he drove ambulance in World War First. Hemingway did his schooling from Oak Park and River Forest High school. During this period, he was involved in water polo, football, boxing, track and field and in others sports. During his high school time he edited school newspaper and yearbook Trapeze and Tabula. His mantra for writing, which was a foundation for it, he took from Star’s style guide. The mantra was- “use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” Ernest Hemingway’s writing style is known as the ‘iceberg theory’.

His notable works are- In Our Time, The Old Man and The Sea, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have not, For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises. He was awarded Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 and Nobel Prize in literature in 1954. Hemingway died on 2nd July 1961. He shot himself with his favorite shotgun. If you want to read more about Ernest Hemingway’s interesting life, you can concern a good book. Here for you, top Ernest Hemingway quotes below, which you love to bookmark or love to read again and again reminiscing him.

Top Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Ernest Hemingway Quotes on Love & Life

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

Ernest Hemingway Quotes on Love

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

Ernest Hemingway Quotes about Life

Also see: Quotes About Arrogance

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

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

Also see: Inspirational Keep Trying Quotes

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

Also see: One Day At a Time Quotes

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

Also see: Anything is Possible Quotes

“Courage is grace under pressure.”

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

Also see: Life Gets Hard Quotes

“There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”

“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.”

Also see: Motivational Wake Up Quotes

“Never confuse movement with action.”

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”

“In order to write about life first you must live it.”

“you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

“What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

“Wine is the most civilized thing in the world”

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it”

“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.”

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

Ernest Hemingway Quotes on Writing

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”

Ernest Hemingway Quotes on Writing

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

“It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.”

“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”

“Remember to get the weather in your damn book–weather is very important.”

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

Ernest Hemingway Quotes on War

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

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.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.

Perhaps wars weren’t won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.

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

War is not won by victory.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

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.

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

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

I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there’s a lot of difference.

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.

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.

But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

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

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.

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

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.

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.

Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.

Interesting Facts About Ernest Hemingway

  • He wanted to fight in Word War first but could not, because of his poor eye sight.
  • He did not write only novels, short story or journals. Once he wrote a recipe about apple pie and published in his column.
  • He was known to be a spy. It is said and even confirmed. He was a KGB spy in 1940 and got known by his undercover name ‘Argo’.
  • During the later life years, he was under surveillance by FBI officials, and this thing tolled on him. He went into depression and ended his own life.
  • He is said to be a tough man. Because he survived malaria, anthrax, pneumonia, skin cancer and two plane crashes. It is like coming out of so many hells. He was really a tough man.
  • He shot himself with his favorite gun and ended his life at age of 61. The shotgun was purchased from Abercrombie & Fitch.
  • Perhaps he was a man of many affairs. He married four times. Hadley Richardson, Pauline, Martha Gelhorn, and Mary Hemingway. He married all these four women.
  • Writes often fight perhaps, not with fists but with words. A bet with fellow writes about who could write a six words short story, Hemingway came up with- “For Sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” At the end, he won the bet.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald advised Hemingway to end his novel A Farewell to Arms by writing him ten-page letter. Hemingway replied by saying “kiss my ass.”
  • Ernest loved cats. He had fifty cats.
  • He went by the name of Saviers at the Mayo Clinic making media believe that he go treated for hypertension.
  • It is said and often rumored that Fidel Castro and Hemingway were friends and they briefly met at Hemingway’s annual Billfishing tournament. Castro revered the writer and his favorite novel was ‘For whom the Bell Tolls’.
  • Hemingway once stole a urinal from his favorite bar for a reason that he had “pissed away” so much money in that, for which he owned it. The urinal is on display at the museum.
  • Writer block came to Hemingway too, and to him it was so killing that he could not write a word or sentence during presentation volume for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
  • He wrote and rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times to set it perfect and arranging the words proper.