"Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try."
"All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens."
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Source: Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba. Esquire, December 1934.
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More quotes by Ernest Hemingway
"Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."
"The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too."
"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."
"Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors."
"Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything."