Ernest Hemingway

Bekannte Zitate von Ernest Hemingway

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.

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

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

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Courage is grace under pressure.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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 learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

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

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.

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.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

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.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

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.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.

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

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

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

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

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.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

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

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.

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.