For Whom the Bell Tolls Quotes

“And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“But did thee feel the earth move?”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it’s never done.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“No Pilar," Agustin said. "You are not smart. You are brave. You are loyal. You have decision. You have intuition. Much decision and much heart. But you are not smart.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span. (Chapter 13)”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I am an old man who will live until I die," Anselmo said.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“So now do not worry, take what you have, and do your work and you will have a long life and a very merry one.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope), ...”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“There is a lot of time between now and the fall term. There is a lot of time between now and the day after tomorrow if you want to put it that way ...”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“But you have no house and no courtyard to your no-house, he thought. You have no family but a brother who goes to battle tomorrow and you own nothing but the wind and the sun and an empty belly. The wind is small, he thought, and there is no sun. You have four grenades in your pocket but they are only good to throw away. You have a carbine on your back but it is only good to give away bullets. You have a message to give away. And you're full of crap that you can give to the earth, he grinned in the dark. You can anoint it also with urine. Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man, he told himself and grinned again.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Robert Jordan saw them there on the slope, close to him now, and below he saw the road and the bridge and the long lines of vehicles below it. He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay and he touched the bark of the pine trunk that he lay behind... He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“So if your life trades seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“It is the fault of the orders, which are too rigid. There is no allowance for a change in circumstance.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Heresy is the foe of countenance”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“He missed the prayers but he thought it would be unfair and hypocritical to say them and he did not wish to ask any favors or for any different treatment than all the men were receiving.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia," karkov grinned and began. "First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls from them, Then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool."

"Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. that is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“There is no language so filthy as Spanish. There are words for all the vile words in English and there are other words and expressions that are used only in countries where blasphemy keeps pace with the austerity of religion.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“If he had known how many men in history have had to use a hill to die one it would not have cheered him any for, in the moment he was passing through, men are not impressed by what has happened to the other men in similar circumstances any more than a widow of one day is helped by the knowledge that other loved husbands have died.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Augustin stood there looking down at him and cursed him speaking slowly clearly bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Nessun uomo è un'isola, completo in se stesso; ogni uomo è un pezzo del continente, una parte del tutto. Se anche solo una nuvola venisse lavata via dal mare, l'Europa ne sarebbe diminuita, come se le mancasse un promontorio, come se venisse a mancare una dimora di amici tuoi, o la tua stessa casa. La morte di qualsiasi uomo mi sminuisce, perché io sono parte dell'umanità. E dunque non chiedere mai per chi suona la campana: suona per te.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls