Top 759 Quotes & Sayings by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Page 2

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.

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.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

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

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

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.

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.

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.

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

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

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

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

I'm a cynical idealist.

...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.

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.

The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one's mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.

Never confuse activity with action.

The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.

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.

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

Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth.

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

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.

She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.

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

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.

Egyptian Proverb: The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, To want for one who comes not, To try to please and please not.

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

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

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

We all have souls of different ages

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

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistant, you must also have the ability to start over.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

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

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.

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

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

A squalid phantasmagoria of breath

Life cracked like ice!

No matter how low you go, there's always an unexplored basement.

When I'm with you, I don't breathe quite right.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

i'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires

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.

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

Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.

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.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.