But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Courage is grace under pressure.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
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.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
Never mistake motion for action.
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.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
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.
You're beautiful, like a May fly.
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
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.
Time is the least thing we have of.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
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.
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.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
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.
Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
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.
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.
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
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.
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.
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
