As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

—Ernest Hemingway

age necessity heroes

About Ernest Hemingway

Portrait of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway ( HEM-ing-way; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. Some of his seven novels, six...

More quotations from Ernest Hemingway

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

—Ernest Hemingway

That is the greatest fallacy, the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

—Ernest Hemingway

wisdom age caution care

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.

—Ernest Hemingway

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

—Ernest Hemingway

attention listening talking

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

—Ernest Hemingway

resolution will defeat determination

More quotations tagged with “heroes”

It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame. This is the tragedy of the world. For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile.

—Alice Walker

hope heroism tragedy shame heroes the world

Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is.

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.

Our heroes are people and people are flawed. Don't let that taint the thing you love.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson