Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.”

— Stephen Fry

52. “Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.”

— Stephen Fry

53. “Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.”

— Stephen Fry

54. “Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.”

— Stephen Fry

55. “Come back, and do that thing, be lovely to each-other.”

— Stephen Fry

56. “It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.”

— Stephen Fry

57. “The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert’s seventh symphony. And I’ve rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.”

— Stephen Fry

58. “I’m afraid I was very much the traditionalist. I went down on one knee and dictated a proposal which my secretary faxed over straight away.”

— Stephen Fry

59. “I’m absolute attacking my own instinct for politeness, but I think I admire artists who just speak out or who are strong, so it’s very hard.”

— Stephen Fry

60. “Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.”

— Stephen Fry

61. “How to separate the humiliation from the loss, that’s the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.”

— Stephen Fry

62. “What makes a good family? Well, I suppose obviously love. Love lubricated often I think by humor. I think a family that can laugh at each other and tease themselves and who are able to be jolly with each other I think is the key.”

— Stephen Fry

63. “Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books.”

— Stephen Fry

64. “The email of the species is deadlier than the mail.”

— Stephen Fry

65. “You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture.”

— Stephen Fry

66. “Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave.”

— Stephen Fry

67. “Homosexuals are not interested in making other people homosexuals. Homophobes are interested in making other people homophobes.”

— Stephen Fry

68. “The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn’t true you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife.”

— Stephen Fry

69. “I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.”

— Stephen Fry

70. “I do think it’s important not to be absolutely sure, so sure that you can’t reinvent yourself in some way, or at least rediscover the truth of why you think what you think, and not just take it as an assumption.”

— Stephen Fry

71. “In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.”

— Stephen Fry

72. “We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously.”

— Stephen Fry

73. “Money and fame are trashy and don’t guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it.”

— Stephen Fry

74. “Progress isn’t achieved by preachers or guardians of morality, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics.”

— Stephen Fry

75. “Between funny and witty Falls the shadow.”

— Stephen Fry

76. “I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.”

— Stephen Fry

77. “When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.”

— Stephen Fry

78. “I hate it when people say swearing isn’t necessary. Things not being necessary is what makes life interesting, the little extras in life.”

— Stephen Fry

79. “If I were to believe in a god l would believe in gods. I think monotheism is the really ghastly thing. That is the absolutely staggering to me misapprehension.”

— Stephen Fry

80. “But happiness is no respecter of persons.”

— Stephen Fry

81. “I shall sustain a massive erection, that’s what, and I shan’t be answerable for the consequences. Some kind of ejaculation is almost bound to ensue and if either of you were to become pregnant I should never forgive myself.”

— Stephen Fry

82. “If there were a God he would want us to be better spirited than to take his word for everything.”

— Stephen Fry

83. “Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.”

— Stephen Fry

84. “If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you’ll find it.”

— Stephen Fry

85. “My father was all brain and little heart.”

— Stephen Fry

86. “I’d probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I’ve always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.”

— Stephen Fry

87. “The church has no power over our lives any more, which is something of a blessing for those who do not enjoy red-hot pokers or iron thumb-screws...”

— Stephen Fry

88. “The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.”

— Stephen Fry

89. “Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.”

— Stephen Fry

90. “When you take a lot of cocaine powder you tend to take a lot of alcohol with it as well, so for many years really I never went out without at least four or five grams of cocaine powder.”

— Stephen Fry

91. “Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.”

— Stephen Fry

92. “I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.”

— Stephen Fry

93. “You’ve just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.”

— Stephen Fry

94. “I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective.”

— Stephen Fry

95. “An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.”

— Stephen Fry

96. “Simon Gray, I decided when I first witnessed this frog into prince transformation, did not have a drinking problem. He had a drinking solution.”

— Stephen Fry

97. “I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.”

— Stephen Fry

98. “I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.”

— Stephen Fry

99. “How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?”

— Stephen Fry

100. “Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”

— Stephen Fry