Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Ernest Hemingway (American Author)

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. At the height of his popularity, this 1954 Nobel laureate was acknowledged as the most celebrated literary stylists of the 20th century.

Hemmingway’s life and literary career were contentious from the outset. The Hemingway machismo persona included hard-drinking, a confrontational disposition, and a penchant for bullfights, prizefights, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing.

Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. His father, a doctor, introduced Hemingway to the rituals of hunting and fishing. His mother was religious and musical. Much of Hemingway’s later creativity was inspired by reminiscences of vacation trips to northern Michigan, the setting of some of his most extraordinary stories.

After serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, Hemingway became a journalist in Paris, where he came into contact with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and other writers. He later served as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

Hemingway’s principal literary theme is war—as a personal and symbolic experience, moral condition, and a steady-state of the human spirit. His notable works include The Sun Also Rises (1926,) A Farewell to Arms (1929,) For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940,) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952; Pulitzer, 1953.) His collections of stories include Men without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933.)

During his life, Hemingway was a celebrity whose every move was reported in the newspapers and magazines of his day. When he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Idaho’s Sun Valley, word of his death made front-page news around the world. A number of his significant works, including A Moveable Feast (1964,) The Nick Adams Stories (1972,) and The Dangerous Summer (1985,) were published after his death.

Most of Hemingway’s novels and many of his short stories have been made into feature films. He has inspired numerous full-length biographies, countless personal remembrances by family and friends, and many books of criticism.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ernest Hemingway

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.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Hunting

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Doctors, Medicine

The world is a fine place worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: World

As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Inaction, Procrastination, Getting Going

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.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Letters

To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Heaven

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Humor

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: Literature, Books

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: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Retirement

In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Wine

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Paradise

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn’t kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Literature, Criticism

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Exile

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Listening

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers, Art

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Evil

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Doubt, Uncertainty

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Publishing, Books, Publishers

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Words

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Authors & Writing

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last in it, and not be smashed by it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Resolve, Perseverance, Endurance

Courage is grace under pressure.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Courage, Bravery

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Words

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Prayer

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writers, Art, Authors & Writing

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

I know now that there is no one thing that is true—it is all true.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Truth

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