Posted by: Leslie Sigal Javorek • Date: Tues. Feb. 23, 2010 3:50 am

It is late and I am tired and, more importantly I think I’m keeping me Hubby up as he sleeps beside me and my trusty laptop… So I’m going to make tonight’s post a quick one by sharing with you some of my most favorite quotes out of the mouth (or typewriter) of Ernest Hemingway. Some of these are simply clever but the rest are the kind that make you want to reflect on them for a while and as you turn them around in your thoughts, different facets jump out at you and you realize that, Ernie, was not as “simple” as he claimed to be…

“Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, American Author & Journalist, from his novel “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952)

“You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, Speaking to his son Gregory, as quoted in Papa, a Personal Memoir (1976) Gregory H. Hemingway

“War is no longer made by simply analysed 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 misruled. “
– Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter” first published in Esquire (September 1935)

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940)

“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, Nobel Prize Speech Delivered from Hemingway’s notes by US Ambassador John C. Cabot (1954) Full Text

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, from an interview of Ernest by George Plimpton in the Paris Review Issue 18 (Spring 1958); later published in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963)

(Courage is) “Grace under pressure”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, Hemingway’s definition of “guts” as recounted by Dorothy Parker in the New Yorker (30 November 1929)

“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 new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”
– Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961, “Death in the Afternoon” (1932)

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