Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 8

151. “Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again.”

— Stephen Fry

152. “I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.”

— Stephen Fry

153. “Generally, we admire the thing we are not.”

— Stephen Fry

154. “It is astonishing how articulate one can become when alone and raving at a radio. Arguments and counter arguments, rhetoric and bombast flow from one’s lips like scurf from the hair of a bank manager.”

— Stephen Fry

155. “A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.”

— Stephen Fry

156. “Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.”

— Stephen Fry

157. “Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.”

— Stephen Fry

158. “A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.”

— Stephen Fry

159. “Over the years however, my nose grew and grew and it became apparent by the time I was fourteen that, like its owner, it was not growing straight.”

— Stephen Fry

160. “When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.”

— Stephen Fry

161. “I think it was Harry Walpole who remarked, “In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.”

— Stephen Fry

162. “A month’s salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.”

— Stephen Fry

163. “Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it’s an endless stalemate.”

— Stephen Fry

164. “Do not do what you want to do, but what you judge your enemy least wants you to do.”

— Stephen Fry

165. “My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.”

— Stephen Fry

166. “We recognize that if we had ever encountered the real demon demigod Achilles, we woul have feared and dreaded him, hated his temper, despised his pride and been repelled by his savagery. But we know too that we could not have helped loving him.”

— Stephen Fry

167. “Priapus became the god of male genitalia and phalluses; he was especially prized by the Romans as the minor deity of the major boner.”

— Stephen Fry

168. “For the world seems never to offer anything worthwhile without also providing a dreadful opposite.”

— Stephen Fry

169. “There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.”

— Stephen Fry

170. “Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.”

— Stephen Fry

171. “A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling.”

— Stephen Fry

172. “People still don’t get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.”

— Stephen Fry

173. “That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.”

— Stephen Fry

174. “I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.”

— Stephen Fry

175. “I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you’re never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It’s in the spirit of it.”

— Stephen Fry

176. “My secret is that I have never thought there is a secret to anything in life. Passion. Love. Drive. Work. Work. Work. Dull but true.”

— Stephen Fry

177. “I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way.”

— Stephen Fry

178. “It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there’s an email, most of the time there’s a letter, someone wants something of you.”

— Stephen Fry

179. “What Pandora did not know was that, when she shut the lid of the jar so hastily, she for ever imprisoned inside one last daughter of Nyx. One last little creature was left behind to beat its wings hopelessly in the jar for ever. Its name was ELPIS, Hope.”

— Stephen Fry

180. “Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they’re truly great rather than making you feel that tall they make you feel that tall, that they’re greatness as it were improves you.”

— Stephen Fry

181. “It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.”

— Stephen Fry

182. “It was a Tuesday in February. Many my life’s most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?”

— Stephen Fry

183. “Mental health is one of the last great taboos.”

— Stephen Fry

184. “I have Van Gogh’s ear for music.”

— Stephen Fry

185. “Self-consciousness, that’s what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What’s the trick?”

— Stephen Fry

186. “When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.”

— Stephen Fry

187. “I think the fact that I’m so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn’t be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman – I’ll kiss a frog if you like.”

— Stephen Fry

188. “As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they’re upset by the weirdness of their own family.”

— Stephen Fry

189. “There can’t be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn’t room. There can’t be.”

— Stephen Fry

190. “I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.”

— Stephen Fry

191. “I like people who are as unlike me as possible, which is not an expression of self disgust or self hatred, but it’s just that you know you obviously particularly admire things that you recognize yourself as not having.”

— Stephen Fry

192. “If days be good, they shall pass, which is a lowering thought. If they be bad, they shall pass, which is cheering.”

— Stephen Fry

193. “After the shooting of John Lennon and the early death of so many great stars and the utter naked venal mercantile marketing of pop music and rock music, I don’t think anyone really believes that music is anything more than another commodity.”

— Stephen Fry

194. “There is so much we can learn from TV. It’s a window on the world.”

— Stephen Fry

195. “When lust descends, discretion, common sense and wisdom fly off and what may seem cunning concealment to one in the grip of passion looks like transparently clumsy idiocy to everyone else.”

— Stephen Fry

196. “Not one word of the following is true.”

— Stephen Fry

197. “A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.”

— Stephen Fry

198. “The action is played out on the golden horizon between reality and legend, the beguiling penumbra where fable and fact coexist.”

— Stephen Fry

199. “It was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, sexism or any other kind of prejudice or snobbery. ‘Because you are not cute, I do not want to know you’ was, to me, hardly different from suggesting ’because you are gay, I dislike you.”

— Stephen Fry

200. “As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.”

— Stephen Fry