Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

452. “There’s no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don’t feel it at all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

454. “The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

456. “He’s sensitive and I don’t want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn’t care about him.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

457. “She knew few words and believed in none.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

458. “We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can’t. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

459. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something- most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

460. “I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

461. “To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

462. “So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

463. “I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can’t I be happy?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

464. “I’ve got an adjective that just fits you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

465. “There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

466. “I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

467. “The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

468. “When I see a beautiful shell like that I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

469. “So there was not an “I” anymore-not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect-save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

470. “The things that’ll make you fail I’ll love always.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

471. “I want to tell you about your heart – you’ve probably been neglecting your heart – and you don’t know.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

472. “Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved – to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

473. “Receding from grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

474. “He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

475. “The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

476. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

477. “I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

478. “Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired to that June night.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

479. “Beware the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

480. “Once a change of direction has begun, even though it’s the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of rightness as if it had been a natural all along.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

481. “He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

482. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

483. “To most women art is a form of scandal.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

484. “People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

485. “He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

486. “Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

487. “When the lightning strikes one of us, it strikes both.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

488. “She was incurably dishonest.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

490. “No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

491. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

492. “In fact, I once imagined you loved me a little bit, if you’ll excuse the presumption.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

493. “There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

494. “No decent career was ever founded on a public.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

495. “I love this simply because it’s cute, and I guess it’s a sign of the times in many respect. It’s pretty much saying you complete me, only in the sweetest way possible.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

496. “Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

497. “Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

498. “The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

500. “I want leisure to read – an immense amount.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald