Alicerçando Palavras # 39 - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway - 1928


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


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.


Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.


What is moral is what you feel good after.


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



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


Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.


A man can be destroyed but not defeated.


An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools


Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.


I always try to write on the principal of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show.