If you’re looking for F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes about life, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people. And in this article we share a list of the 26 most interesting quotes about life by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Let’s get inspired!
F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes about life
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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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 you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself – art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria – he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights…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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I suppose that there’s a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Human sympathy has its limits.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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
I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am glad you are happy–but 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
It was too late – everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life — I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved — in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
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, The Great Gatsby
We’ll all be failures?””Yes. I don’t mean only money failures, but just sort of – of ineffectual and sad, and – oh, how can I tell you?
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
The present was the thing–work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wish I had done everything on earth with you
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life–not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Offshore Pirate
A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
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–not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I’ve been through hell without a whine quite often–and the female hell is deadlier than the male.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis– a moulding of the confusion of life into form.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bowl
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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon
You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
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