Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

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.

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.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

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.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.