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Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald


Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Forgotten is forgiven.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
It takes a genius to whine appealingly.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
See that little stream, we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a whole month tot walk to it, a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The victor belongs to the spoils.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are no second acts in American lives.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm a romantic a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald