Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respectโyou don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.
F. Scott FitzgeraldTrouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
F. Scott FitzgeraldThere's so much spring in the air- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.
F. Scott FitzgeraldOf course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald