Ernest Hemingway
Master of understated prose, Nobel laureate
Most quoted
"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."
— from A Farewell to Arms, 1929
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you have finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
— from Death in the Afternoon, 1964
"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 afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
— from Death in the Afternoon (posthumously published preface), 1964
All quotes by Ernest Hemingway (235)
It is not what happens to you in life that matters, but how you react to it.
Why did they make them so beautiful and so fragile?
The sea was his life.
He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he Had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.
Everything good in life is either immoral, illegal or fattening.
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.
The first and last thing required of a man is that he be brave.
I hate war as only a soldier who has fought in it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
I still believe that man's finest hour is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.
The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
The great thing about the dead is that they are not going to hurt you.
The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he may simply be resting.
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than the man who has lived many years among his books and never written one.
To hell with luck. I'll make my own luck.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
The sun also rises.
For whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
Contemporaries of Ernest Hemingway
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961).