Ernest Hemingway Quotes (Author of The Old Man and the Sea) (page 8 of 12)

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
― Ernest Hemingway

 

“Be a damn fire eater now. He'd seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories

“There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories

“Never mistake motion for action.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party's over and you are with your hostess now.
I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.”
― Ernest Hemingway

 

 

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway

 

“Before you act, listen.
Before you react, think.
Before you spend, earn.
Before you criticize, wait.
Before you pray, forgive.
Before you quit, try”
― Ernest Hemingway

 

 

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

 

“Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' Then he added, 'Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish wonderful though he is.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

 

“I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could stand to hear and finally on the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“There isnt always an explanation for everything.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories

“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 that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”
― Ernest Hemingway, American Lit for Idiots - a one act play

“I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories

“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, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I heard them laugh. I turned off the light and tried to go to sleep. It was not necessary to read any more. I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But i could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't!

I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off. That was another bright idea. To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

“Even if he was ever afraid he knew that he could do it anyway.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories

“In those days, there was no money to buy books.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Lie life through its fullest”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war.
There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war.
Also they make money out of it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“If the wind rises it can push us against the flood when it comes.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

“Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

 

 

“A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“She was sick and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick.”
― Ernest Hemingway

 

 

“This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

 

“Religion is the opium of the people. He believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium of the people. Old mount-to-the-head hadn't thought of that. And now economics is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany. What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the people? Of some of the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer the radio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using. Along with these went gambling, an opium of the people if there ever was one, one of the oldest. Ambition was another, an opium of the people along with a belief in any new form of government. What you wanted was the minimum of government, always less government. Liberty, what we believed in, now the name of a MacFadden publication. We believed in that although they had not found a new name for it yet. But what was the real one? What was the real, the actual, opium of the people? He knew it very well. It was gone just a little way around the corner in that well-lighted part of his mind that was there after two or more drinks in the evening; that he knew was there (it was not really there of course). What was it? He knew very well. What was it? Of course; bread was the opium of the people. Would he remember that and would it make sense in the daylight? Bread is the opium of the people.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

...to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Your blood coagulates beautifully.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

 

A writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

 

“You have to make it inside of yourself wherever you are.”
― Ernest Hemingway