Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald (American Novelist)

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short-story writer who is famous for his vivid portrait of the “Jazz Era” of the 1920s in such novels as The Great Gatsby.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was named for his eminent ancestor, Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the American national anthem. He joined Princeton University, where he wrote the lyrics for a few musical comedies. During World War I, he served as the second lieutenant in the army and wrote his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920,) which made him instantly famous.

Fitzgerald married the glamorous Zelda Sayre, and they embarked on a life of high living, big spending, and party-going, which characterized the “Jazz Age.” His next books, the novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and two collections of stories—Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)—became sensational best-sellers.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is arguably America’s most celebrated novel. It features a near-criminal, but impractical financier whose romantic and destructive passion for the greedy and self-absorbed Daisy Buchanan leads ultimately to his death.

Fitzgerald sustained his professional career partly by writing Hollywood movie scripts—most notably, he refined the screenplays for Gone with the Wind (1939) and A Yank at Oxford (1938.) He wrote one additional completed novel, Tender Is the Night (1934) and the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941.) His personal life declined because of alcoholism and his wife’s mental illness.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Riches, Wealth

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
Topics: Art

The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Writing

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Personality

I know myself, but that is all.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Self-Knowledge, Identity

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Past, The Past, Time, Hope

Life was a damned muddle – a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of – everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Life

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

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Heroes, Heroes/Heroism

Her voice is full of money.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Riches, Wealth

Never confuse activity with action.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Action

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – 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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Attitude, Ideas, Positive Attitudes, Ability, Wisdom, Hope, Mindsets, Optimism, Intelligence

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Women, Faces, Face

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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Mistakes, Failures, Defeat, Failure

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Despair

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Ability, Genius, Action, One liners

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing, Art

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Adversity

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Age

You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Art, Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go by 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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Family

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Poetry, Art

I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Alcohol, Drinking

Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Life

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Party, Twentieth Century

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghosty heart
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Challenges

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Optimism

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Advertising

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