Ernest Hemingway quotes

I saw how their minds worked; if they had minds and if they worked. They were all young men and they were saving their country.

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.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.

Hunger is good discipline.

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits.

But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

The studio where he lived with his wife Dorothy on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was as poor as Gertrude Stein’s studio was rich. It had very good light and was heated by a stove and it had paintings by Japanese artists that Ezra knew.

Ezra wanted me to teach him to box and it was while we were sparring late one afternoon in his studio that I first met Wyndham Lewis.

Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble.

The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

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

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.

I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence.

But man is not made for defeat, he said. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.