F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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.

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.

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

And in the end, we were all just humans...Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

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.

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.

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

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.

Before you criticize others, remember, they may not have had the same opportunities in life as you have had

...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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

Intelligence is measured by a person's ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.

Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things...My courage is faith-faith in the eternal resilience of me-that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide

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

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.

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

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

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

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.

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

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.

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

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.

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. 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. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. 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.

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

She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!

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

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

So we'll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.

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

Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable… .

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. 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. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.

all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand

one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.

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.

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...... And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

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.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.