Quotes By Ernest Hemingway

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.

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

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

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.

Never mistake motion for action.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

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.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Courage is grace under pressure.

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.

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

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

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

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

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.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

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