Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.”

— Stephen Fry

52. “Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.”

— Stephen Fry

53. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

55. “As Yoda had expressed it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

— Stephen Fry

56. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

63. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

65. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

69. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

73. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

75. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

80. “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

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. “But happiness is no respecter of persons.”

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

84. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

93. “There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.”

— Stephen Fry

94. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

96. “Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There’s very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I’m lucky enough that it’s reasonably mild in my case.”

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

99. “It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.”

— Stephen Fry

100. “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