21 powerful quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald to inspire you

04/19/2025 by

Today I thought it would be interesting to explore some of the great quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized.

During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

In 1920, he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise. The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.

By any measure, he was a successful man, and, as I’ve said before, it’s always worth listening to successful people.

So here are 21 quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald to inspire you.

Take a few moments to be inspired, and please feel free to pass them on.

21 Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1-10):

  1. Action is character.
  2. Forgotten is forgiven.
  3. You can stroke people with words.
  4. Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.
  5. Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
  6. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
  7. Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
  8. Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
  9. Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
  10. In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
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Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald (11-21):

  1. No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
  2. Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
  3. No such thing as a man willing to be honest. That would be like a blind man willing to see.
  4. You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
  5. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
  6. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
  7. Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
  8. 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.
  9. The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
  10. My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.
  11. Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to 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.

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