Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24th, 1896 – December 21st, 1940), known as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist. He is most known for his novels about the excess of the Jazz Age.
When Fitzgerald died, he and the critics who knew his work thought it was a failure. His New York Times obituary deemed his work forever tied to an era “when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession”.
Within a year after his death, Edmund Wilson finished Fitzgerald’s incomplete fifth novel The Last Tycoon using Fitzgerald’s notes. He also included The Great Gatsby within the edition. The Great Gatsby gained momentum when it was distributed free to American soldiers serving overseas.
By 1960, thirty-five years after the novel’s original publication, it was selling 100,000 copies per year, and The New York Times editorialist called it a masterwork of American literature. By the 21st century, The Great Gatsby had sold millions of copies, and it’s now required reading in many high school and college classes.
Below we list words of wisdom from F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“The greatest profound pain is caused by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.”
“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 that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.”
“To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.”
“She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.”
“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.”
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
“You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.”
“And in the end, we were all just humans…Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.”
“Intelligence is measured by a person’s ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.”
“Before you criticize others, remember, they may not have had the same opportunities in life as you have had.”
“…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. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true.”
“Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.”
“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.”
“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
“I never blame failure – there are too many complicated situations in life – but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.”
“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”
“No matter how low you go, there’s always an unexplored basement.”
“Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things…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.”
“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.”
“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
“Don’t forget who you are and where you come from.”
“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”
“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”
“Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.”
“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”
“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”
“Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
“It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.”
Copyright © 2026 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo
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