The 84 Best Phrases of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most important writers in history This author is one of the great references of North American literature, known for works such as The Old Man and the Sea or A Farewell to Arms, and winner of a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer Prize.

Ernest Hemingway’s most memorable phrases

In the following lines you will find a selection of phrases from Ernest Hemingway to soak up the mentality and genius of this great writer.

1. Always do sober what you said you were going to do drunk. That’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Advice full of humor.

2. The most painful thing is to lose yourself in the process of loving someone too much and forgetting that they are also special.

Each person exists beyond the emotions we feel for them.

3. Why, honey, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.

About the bonds of dependency created with love

4. The first cure for a badly managed nation is currency inflation; the second is war. Both provide temporary wealth; Both bring permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

A critique of the dialectic between prosperity and misery.

5. Going to another country makes no difference. I’ve tried all that. You cannot get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. It’s not possible.

Problems don’t go away just by moving.

6. The best way to know if you can trust someone is to trust them.

To trust someone it is necessary to make a sacrifice and take the first step.

7. Why do old people wake up so early? Is it to have a longer day?

An appreciation based on personal experience of everyday life.

8. All my life I have seen words as if I were seeing them for the first time.

A way of experiencing language as a constant flow.

9. When writing a novel, a writer must create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.

References:

seen as a different plane of existence.

10. The world breaks us all, and afterward, many are strong in the broken places.

Strengths appear from mistakes or emotional wounds

11. There is nothing noble in being superior to your neighbor; true nobility is being superior to your previous self.

The competition that is worth it is the one that takes place with oneself.

12. I may not be as strong as I think, but I know a lot of tricks and I have a resolve.

An optimistic look towards the future.

13. Try to understand it. You are not a tragic character.

Not everything that happens to us happens because the world revolves around us.

14. We are all apprentices in a trade in which no one becomes a master.

It is impossible to achieve absolute mastery.

15. Wisdom, power and knowledge have a secret, it is humility.

Being humble leads us to persist.

16. Do you ever get the feeling that your whole life is passing by and you are not taking advantage of it? Do you realize that you have lived almost half the time you have to live?

An appreciation of what a life well lived is.

17. Live the full life of the mind, exalted by new ideas, intoxicated by the romance of the unusual.

One of Ernest Hemingway’s phrases focused on a positive message.

18. I love sleeping. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

A very personal statement.

19. It is good to have an end of the journey to go to; but it’s the journey that matters, in the end.

The goal is not as important as the process.

20. When you start living outside of yourself, everything is dangerous.

Get out of the comfort zone It has its costs.

21. Now is not the time to think about what you don’t have. Think about what you can do with it.

Obsessing over what is missing does not help you progress.

22. The difficult part of writing a novel is finishing it.

Tying up the loose ends and creating something that makes sense of all of the above is the complicated part.

23. If others heard me talking out loud, they would think I was crazy. But since I’m not, I don’t care.

What others think is not as important as it usually seems to us.

24. There is nothing to write. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed.

Writing can simply be expressing our emotional side.

25. I drink to make other people more interesting.

A phrase full of humor about social relationships.

26. I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you forever, but I had never seen you before.

An apparent paradox.

27. It is foolish not to have hope. It is a sin not to think.

You can’t live without expecting anything.

28. I’m not unfaithful, honey. I have many faults, but I am very faithful. You will be fed up with me, I will be very faithful.

A quality to be claimed.

29. I’m not brave anymore, darling. I’m all broken. They have broken me.

The bad experiences They can lead us to stop wanting to face our fears.

30. The most ruthless beings are always the sentimental ones.

An aphorism to reflect on.

31. I am trying in all my stories to convey the feeling of real life, not only to represent life, or criticize, but to make it really alive.

A universe lives in a few lines of text.

32. Worry a little every day and you will lose a couple of years in life. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But be prepared not to worry: worry never fixes anything.

Obsessions, in themselves, are useless if they do not lead to action.

33. Every day is a new day. It’s better to be lucky. But I prefer to be realistic. Then, when luck comes, you’re ready.

Adjusting to realistic expectations makes us more stable.

34. All thinking men are atheists.

An opinion about religiosity.

35. Courage is grace under pressure.

Interesting metaphor about difficult times.

36. Never think that war, no matter how necessary or justified, is not a crime.

There are contexts that are inherently bad.

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

An important nuance.

38. Don’t do what you honestly don’t want to do. Do not confuse movement with action.

It is better not to fool yourself.

39. Knowing a name and knowing what’s on their mind are two different things.

Knowing someone does not lead us to know exactly what they think.

40. Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

A reflection on intelligence.

41. We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.

A metaphor about how through wounds we grow.

42. That terrible state of depression, being good or being bad, is what is known as the artist’s reward.

About the tormented character of many artists.

43. In a writer’s office, the trash can is the best piece of furniture.

Funny observation about the writer’s task

44. The important thing is to become a teacher in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.

The best of two ages.

45. There is no friend as loyal as a book.

A source of knowledge.

46. ​​Good people, if we think about it a little, are always happy people.

About kindness.

47. The first draft of anything sucks.

There is no need to be discouraged.

48. There is something that differentiates the rich from others: the rich have money.

A differentiation that emphasizes similarities.

49. Forget your personal tragedy. We are all angry.

Go beyond individuality.

50. Every man’s life ends the same way. Only the details of how he lived and how he died distinguish one man from another.

About what makes us memorable

51. A ton of madness. That’s what poets are. That’s how they should be. You can’t put a crazy ton in the madhouse.

A way to channel non-normative ways of thinking.

52. A cat has absolute emotional honesty: Human beings, for one reason or another, can hide their feelings, but a cat cannot.

About the repressed character of the human being.

53. The most horrible thing there is is the blank sheet of paper.

Starting to write is very complicated.

54. Every man who begins to live in a serious way on the inside also begins to lead a simpler life on the outside.

Another of Hemingway’s phrases that show a paradox.

55. I like to listen. I learned a lot by listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Stopping and observing helps us grow.

56. All you have to do is write a true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

Starting from something that is true helps to chain more statements.

57. The world is a good place and it is worth fighting for.

About the need to strive to improve the world

58. For some time now I have tried to write as best I can. Sometimes I have the good fortune to write the best I can.

A sample of the humility of this artist.

59. Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than an insult applied by critics to everything that they do not yet understand or that seems to differ from their moral concepts.

An opinion about rationalized subjectivity.

60. It takes two years to learn to speak and sixty to learn to remain silent.

Another aphorism full of a sense of humor based on irony.

61. No weapon has ever established a moral problem. A solution can be imposed, but it cannot be guaranteed to be fair.

The use of force adds nothing to debates about morality or ethics, it simply imposes a choice.

62. You don’t know it yet, but you love me.

A perspective of romance that goes beyond the logic of time.

63. A man has to suffer a lot of pain to write a funny book.

another paradox about literature

64. I felt that loneliness that one feels at the end of a day of life that one has wasted.

A bitter feeling.

65. As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

Going beyond moral evaluations helps to understand different points of view.

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

Less is more.

67. Never go on a trip with someone you don’t love.

A recommendation that can be seen as a metaphor for life.

68. If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris when you were young, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, as Paris is a moving holiday.

An experience that can change lives.

69. Write hard and clear about what hurts.

Rawness helps establish an emotional connection.

70. When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

Pay attention to everything that flows in communication allows for better understanding.

71. Talent is the way you live your life.

Talent applies to everything.

72. You are so brave and calm that I forget that you are suffering.

Appearances can distance us.

73. An intelligent man is sometimes forced to drink to spend time with fools.

Another observation of literal interpretation.

74. So far about morality, I only know that what is moral is what makes you feel good afterwards and what is immoral is what makes you feel bad afterwards.

A very simple way to understand morality.

75. But life is not difficult to manage when you have nothing to lose.

About what we do to live life.

76. All truly evil things begin from innocence.

Innocence can lead us to build a perverse morality.

77. The older we are, the more difficult it is for us to have heroes, but it is a kind of necessity.

The references we admire They lead us to develop.

78. I love sleeping. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

A nice metaphor.

79. The sea is sweet and it is beautiful, but it can also be cruel.

The personification of the sea to express how we live it.

80. Despite not following his dictates, man always has a heart.

Feelings always count.

81. There is not a single thing that is true. Everything is true.

A relativistic way of seeing things.

82. Live the full life of the mind, exalted by new ideas, intoxicated by the romance of the unusual.

Novelty feeds our mind.

83. If two people love each other there can be no happy ending.

A tragic vision about love.

84. They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern warfare, there is nothing sweet or appropriate about your death. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

A tragic way of seeing the world as a meaningless place.