Quotes By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

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.

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

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.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

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

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.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

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

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

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.

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

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.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

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

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

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.

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

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.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

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.

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.

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

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