F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and, if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over.

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

I know myself, but that is all.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.

Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

Advertising is a racket...its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see.

At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look At 45 they are caves in which we hide.

Her voice is full of money.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

There are no second acts in American lives.

The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act.

A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement.

Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.