Quotes By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

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

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

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.

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.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

There are no second acts in American lives.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

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

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

Forgotten is forgiven.

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.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

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

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

You can stroke people with words.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

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

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.

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.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

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.

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.

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