Quotes by Fitzgerald, F. Scott

"There are no second acts in American lives."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on america   

"No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on honesty   

"The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on men   

"For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on world   

"Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on personality   

"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."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on riches   

"Her voice is full of money."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on riches   

"I know myself, but that is all."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on knowledge   

"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on suffering   

"Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on thoughts and thinking
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"Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on virtue   

"It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on memory
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"At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott on convictions