If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a person's personality is formed by their successful actions and that their sensitivity to life is exceptional.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's quote reflects on the nature of personality, suggesting it is a continuous series of successful actions or 'gestures.' He draws a parallel between a person's heightened sensitivity to life's promises and an intricate machine capable of detecting distant earthquakes, emphasizing the beauty and complexity of such individuals who profoundly engage with the world around them.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about personal development to emphasize the importance of being attuned to life's opportunities.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, is limited in act and understanding by his observation of the order of nature; neither his understanding nor his power extends further.
Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side, even in the same moment. Which one you're in depends entirely on your point of view.
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
When you are fully present, you are truly living; the rest of the time, you are merely existing
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
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