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

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day.
—Ernest Hemingway

When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Politics

All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently. Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books, Literature

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
—Ernest Hemingway

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: Medicine, Doctors

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Age, Role models, Heroes, Aging

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Comedy

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Innocence

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

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.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writers

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

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
—Ernest Hemingway

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

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Contentment

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: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Defects, Depression

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: War

All thinking men are atheists.
—Ernest Hemingway

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers

There is no friend as loyal as a book.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Friendship

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Luck

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

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
—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’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Fight, Fighting

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Invention

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Doing

You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.
—Ernest Hemingway

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Words

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

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