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F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an American writer who was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896. He is best known for his novel “The Great Gatsby,” which is considered a classic of American literature. Fitzgerald attended Princeton University but dropped out before graduating to join the army during World War I.

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After the war, he moved to New York City and became part of the “Lost Generation” of writers and artists who were disillusioned with the post-war world. Fitzgerald’s first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” was published in 1920 and was a commercial success. He went on to write several other novels, including “The Beautiful and Damned” and “Tender Is the Night.”

Despite his success as a writer, Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism and financial problems throughout his life. He was married to fellow writer Zelda Fitzgerald, and their tumultuous relationship was often the subject of his writing. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood, California in 1940 at the age of 44.

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To celebrate the contribution he made to the world of literature, here are some beautiful F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes.

Famous F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

1. “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”

2. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. “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.”

4. “Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”

5. “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.”

6. “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

7. “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

8. “To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.”

9. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

10. “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

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11. “The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.”

12. “I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

13. “Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.”

14. “I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”

15. “I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

16. “I’m not sure what I’ll do, but – well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”

17. “I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

18. “There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”

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

20. “I never blame failure – there are too many complicated situations in life – but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.”

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21. “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

22. “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

23. “You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have.”

24. “Don’t forget who you are and where you come from.”

Don’t forget who you are and where you come from. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

25. “God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”

26. “I’m a cynical idealist.”

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

28. “I hope you live a life you’re proud of.”

29. “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”

30. “Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.”

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31. “You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known – and even that is an understatement.”

32. “For what it’s worth… it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.”

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

34. “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”

35. “Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.”

36. “Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…”

37. “It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”

38. “Forgotten is forgiven.”

39. “He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”

40. “You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.”

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41. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

42. “Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

43. “Actually that’s my secret – I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

44. “Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.”

45. “Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know – because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”

46. “Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.”

47. “Intelligence is measured by a person’s ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.”

48. “Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. – The Great Gatsby.”

49. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

50. “I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”

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51. “Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?”

52. “They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.”

53. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

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

55. “Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”

56. “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

57. “I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

58. “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”

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

60. “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.”

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61. “I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”

62. “Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.”

63. “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

64. “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.”

65. “So we’ll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.”

66. “So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing.”

67. “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”

68. “When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.”

69. “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

70. “Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”

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71. “She was dazzling – alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”

72. “Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

73. “Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.”

74. “You know I’m old in some ways-in others-well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.”

75. “People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”

76. “It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

77. “The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.”

78. “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

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

80. “I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

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81. “Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin – but they don’t, even you and I…”

82. “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.”

83. “Love is fragile – she was thinking – but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.”

84. “He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.”

85. “It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.”

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

86. “People living alone get used to loneliness.”

87. “He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.”

88. “I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.”

89. “Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”

90. “Nothing any good isn’t hard.”

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91. “I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.”

92. “It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”

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

94. “What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?”

95. “She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.”

96. “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

97. “You remind me of a smoked cigarette.”

98. “The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.”

99. “Once we were one person, and always it will be a little that way.”

100. “It appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbours as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.”

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