Ernest Hemingway Life Quotations

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

We're stronger in the places that we've been broken.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

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.

There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only one you.

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.

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.

Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.

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. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.

Why must all of the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?

The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

You must hold hard to life and do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight.

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

There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.

And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

Modern life ... is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

So far, 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 and judged by these standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very normal to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but also very fine.

Life is pain, so live it up while you can.

They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.

To hell with luck. I'll bring the luck with me.

I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.