Ernest Hemingway on working smart

Never mistake motion for action.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway on happiness and intelligence

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway on virtue

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice.  Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway on war

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway on writing and editing

Write drunk; edit sober.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway on editing

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Hadley Richardson on Ernest Hemingway

There were so many sides to him that he defied geometry.

~ Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's first wife

Ernest Hemingway on writing

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway on bankruptcy

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

~ Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway on inflation and war

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. 

~ Ernest Hemingway,“Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter,” Esquire, September 1935 

Ernest Hemingway on war

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule. And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

~ Ernest Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War," 1935

Arlington Amphitheater
1922-1925