Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

302. “People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man’s duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

303. “The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

304. “The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

305. “There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

306. “You can stroke people with words.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

307. “He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

308. “Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

309. “Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

310. “A squalid phantasmagoria of breath.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

311. “But you can love more than just one person, can’t you?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

312. “They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

313. “The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

314. “Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

315. “Fairies: Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

316. “At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

317. “Learn young about hard work and manners – and you’ll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

319. “That’s the whole burden of this novel – the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

320. “Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her in reverse.’ ‘But the WHEEL’S off!’ He hesitated. ‘No harm in trying,’ he said.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

321. “As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

322. “I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

323. “Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

324. “I was too absorbed to be responsive.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

327. “No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

328. “Let’s borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

329. “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

330. “I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe – and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

331. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

332. “Murder your darlings.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

333. “But his eyes, dimmed by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

334. “That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

335. “I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

336. “I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

338. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

340. “I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

343. “He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

344. “Kiss me now, love me now.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

345. “The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

346. “Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

347. “It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

348. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald