Looking for the best and inspirational F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes?
F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most prolific American writers of the 20th century. His novels and short stories, which include “The Great Gatsby,” “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and Damned,” are classic examples of American realism and explores topics such as class, social status, religion, and other aspects of life in America during the early 1900s.
He originally wanted to be a lawyer, but after his third year at Princeton University, he left school to pursue his literary career. He published his first novel in 1920 after having written many short stories for magazines. His next book, “The Beautiful And Damned,” was published in 1922 after working on it for four years.
He died in 1940 at age 44 due to a heart attack in Hollywood. Check out his motivational quotes and sayings that will help you learn how to live life with purpose.
Top 75 Most Inspiring F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
“If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”
“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.”
“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
“Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.”
“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”
“No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”
“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
“An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.”
“Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”
“All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.”
“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.”
“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
“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.”
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right.”
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.”
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him”
“It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.”
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”
“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
“I love her, and that is the beginning and end of everything.”
“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want”
“I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed pages, they never really happen to you in life.”
“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say.”
“If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired”
“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.”
“The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.”
“So we’ll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.”
“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.”
“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.”
“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.”
“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”
“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.”
“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Nothing any good isn’t hard.”
“I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”
“I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.”
“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.”
“Strange children should smile at each other and say, ‘Let’s play.’”
“Cut out all of these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”
“The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last – the romantic”
“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.”
“I never blame failure – there are too many complicated situations in life – but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.”
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.”
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
“Action is character.”
“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
“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.”
“person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”
“No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.”
“I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”
“Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”
“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.”
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
“We all have souls of different ages”
“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”
“No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul.”
“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”
“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”
“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”
“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.”
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.”
“I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”
“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”
