"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a gene… - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– 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."

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

inner-conflict ambivalent implausible hopeless impossible hopelessness intelligence opposing-views ambivalence

English

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About F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (24 September 1896 – 21 December 1940) was an Irish-American novelist and short story writer.

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Native Name: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

Alternative Names: Francis Scott Fitzgerald • Scott Fitzgerald

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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 . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

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.

Originators like F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Thomas Hardy E. M. Forster Truman Capote Henry James Vladimir Nabokov

Additional quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

unloved women have no biographies — they have histories

"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed … - F. Scott Fitzgerald

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