Top 100 Hugh Laurie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”

— Hugh Laurie

Featured in: Time Quotes, Moving Forward Quotes, Carpe Diem Quotes, Risk-Taking Quotes, Hesitation Quotes

2. “Every day is the opportunity for a better tomorrow.”

— Hugh Laurie

3. “It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.”

— Hugh Laurie

4. “There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now.”

— Hugh Laurie

5. “Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive.”

— Hugh Laurie

6. “Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn’t, but it should be.”

— Hugh Laurie

7. “I have my moments. Ever since I was a boy, I never was someone who was at ease with happiness. Too often I embrace introspection and self-doubt. I wish I could embrace the good things.”

— Hugh Laurie

8. “Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless.”

— Hugh Laurie

9. “I run six-to-eight miles a day, plus weights and aerobics in the lunch hour. I also lie a lot, which keeps me thin.”

— Hugh Laurie

10. “Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.”

— Hugh Laurie

11. “Girls are complicated. The instruction manual that comes with girls is 800 pages, with chapters 14, 19, 26 and 32 missing, and it’s badly translated, hard to figure out.”

— Hugh Laurie

12. “Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.”

— Hugh Laurie

13. “I am a coffee fanatic. Once you go to proper coffee, you can’t go back. You cannot go back.”

— Hugh Laurie

14. “Winning a rowing race is not like winning anything else. Here’s my theory: you’re facing backwards, so you’re looking at the people you’re beating – and there’s something exquisite about that.”

— Hugh Laurie

15. “I think that’s the lesson you learn in life. As you get older you realize you’re never going to grow up and you’re never going to be ready. And you may, as well, do things now, don’t wait.”

— Hugh Laurie

16. “Keep on being yourself.”

— Hugh Laurie

17. “I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.”

— Hugh Laurie

18. “I get anxious about a lot of things, that’s the trouble. I get anxious about everything. I just can’t stop thinking about things all the time. And here’s the really destructive part – it’s always retrospective. I waste time thinking of what I should have said or done.”

— Hugh Laurie

19. “I don’t like the act of talking; it makes me slightly light-headed.”

— Hugh Laurie

20. “They, all of them, work incredibly hard to make me seem clever and heroic, neither of which I am.”

— Hugh Laurie

21. “To tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I know. I keep meeting people, both older and younger, who seem to have accrued so much more knowledge or expertise or certainty about who they are and the jobs they do. I just marvel at it.”

— Hugh Laurie

22. “To be a head boy, you have to be very clever, you have to be a scholar, and I was never a scholar in any shape or form.”

— Hugh Laurie

23. “Newton’s Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I’d turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done.”

— Hugh Laurie

24. “Now, my mom always said two wrongs don’t make a right. But she never said anything about four wrongs, and that always left me confused.”

— Hugh Laurie

25. “I don’t believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he’d take it away.”

— Hugh Laurie

26. “It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement.”

— Hugh Laurie

27. “I think classical music tuition is, well, was when I was a child, was an abomination. I think in some ways it is one of life’s great tragedies for everybody who gives up an instrument.”

— Hugh Laurie

28. “I would just hear piano players and I would hear music, and just think – I don’t just want to sit here and passively listen; I want to get inside it.”

— Hugh Laurie

29. “I wouldn’t be able to act like Al Pacino or play the piano like Dr. John, But I could probably act better than Dr. John and play the piano better than Al Pacino.”

— Hugh Laurie

30. “People will survive, and they will find happiness. Happiness only comes when you’re not looking for it.”

— Hugh Laurie

31. “I do actually like Los Angeles. Partly because I was told I wouldn’t.”

— Hugh Laurie

32. “This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.”

— Hugh Laurie

33. “One thing House needs Wilson for is vanity. He needs someone to laugh at his jokes.”

— Hugh Laurie

34. “I never was someone who was at ease with happiness.”

— Hugh Laurie

35. “Perseverance does not equal worthiness. Next time you want to get my attention, wear something fun. Low-riding jeans are hot.”

— Hugh Laurie

Featured in: Fun Quotes

36. “I know a lot of people think therapy is about sitting around staring at your own navel – but it’s staring at your own navel with a goal. And the goal is to one day to see the world in a better way and treat your loved ones with more kindness and have more to give.”

— Hugh Laurie

37. “Piano was – well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.”

— Hugh Laurie

38. “We put this 15-year old girl on the cover of a fashion magazine, and tell everyone she is the epitome of sexual perfection, but we jail anyone who touches her for another three years.”

— Hugh Laurie

39. “Happiness is the twinkle in your grandmother’s eye as you reverse the tractor off her legs.”

— Hugh Laurie

40. “I don’t talk like House, or walk like him. I certainly don’t think like him. I don’t like to think for more than 15 minutes at a stretch actually; I am a fragile flower.”

— Hugh Laurie

41. “You hope that your teenage self would like and forgive your 50-year-old self.”

— Hugh Laurie

42. “My dad gave me my first bike at 16. I soon fell off and was in a wheelchair for weeks. I haven’t fallen since.”

— Hugh Laurie

43. “It’s a holy city for music.”

— Hugh Laurie

44. “Just because it’s a bad job doesn’t mean I need to do it badly.”

— Hugh Laurie

45. “Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.”

— Hugh Laurie

46. “Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. When I ride through Beverly Hills in the early morning, and all the sprinklers have turned off, the scents that wash over me are just heavenly. Being House is like flying, too. You’re free of the gravity of what people think.”

— Hugh Laurie

47. “Humility was considered a great virtue in my family household. No show of complacency or self-satisfaction was ever tolerated. Patting yourself on the back was definitely not encouraged, and pleasure or pride would be punishable by death.”

— Hugh Laurie

48. “I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!”

— Hugh Laurie

49. “It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland – where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.”

— Hugh Laurie

50. “I’m finding it increasingly difficult to simply walk down the street. In New York, I dashed in to buy a big pair of sunglasses to conceal myself, but the guy behind the counter shouted ‘Hey! It’s Dr. House.’”

— Hugh Laurie