Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Kronos had seen by now that his wife was expecting and he readied himself for the happy day when he could consume the sixth of his children. He was taking no chances.”

— Stephen Fry

252. “It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying.”

— Stephen Fry

253. “Zeus sighed heavily. ‘I wish, all those years ago, Prometheus hadn’t persuaded me to make mankind,’ he said. ‘I knew it was a mistake.”

— Stephen Fry

254. “The Listener’s editor when I first joined was Russell Twisk, a surname of such surpassing beauty that I would have written pieces for him if he had been at the helm of Satanic Child-Slaughter Monthly.”

— Stephen Fry

255. “The Greeks, if the truth be told, were far too wise to have a consistent eschatology that presumed infallible knowledge of the afterlife. They had noted that no one ever returned from death and took the sane and sensible view that those who claimed to know what happened to a person after they died were either fools or liars.”

— Stephen Fry

256. “I do believe that almost everything I do is based on my feelings, not on my intellect. Though But we won’t chase ourselves up the particular sentiment, or we’ll get lost.”

— Stephen Fry

257. “One of the reasons I love the online world is that although that exists in abundance you can choose absolutely which part of the online world you want to live in. You can make your own kingdom in that sense.”

— Stephen Fry

258. “I now accept that it is looking increasingly likely that Tiger Woods is, in fact, straight.”

— Stephen Fry

259. “Families where there is not much laughter I think are signs of some sort of dysfunctionality or sickness.”

— Stephen Fry

260. “Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s truncheon.”

— Stephen Fry

261. “Could they remember the first time they felt the sweeping rush of love? Love came to peasants, kings, and even gods. Love made all equal. Love deified, yet love leveled.”

— Stephen Fry

262. “Unlike musical notation, paint or clay, language is inside every one of us. For free. We are all proficient at it. We already have the palette, the paints and the instruments. We don’t have to go and buy any reserved materials. Poetry is made of the same stuff you are reading now, the same stuff you use to order pizza over the phone, the same stuff you yell at your parents and children, whisper in your lover’s ear and shove into an e-mail, text or birthday card. It is common to us all.”

— Stephen Fry

263. “Late, Fry?’ ‘Really, sir? So am I.’ ‘Don’t try to be clever, boy.’ ‘Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?”

— Stephen Fry

264. “I certainly don’t want to be formulaic. I want to be honest and authentic and everything else.”

— Stephen Fry

265. “I’ve suffered for my art, now it’s your turn.”

— Stephen Fry

266. “To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence.”

— Stephen Fry

267. “There is such a thing as the power of suggestion, however. One human mind is capable of being hypnotised or persuaded by another. We have faith, we have Hitler, we have advertising.”

— Stephen Fry

268. “Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos.”

— Stephen Fry

269. “Forget him. What is treasure? Or Briseis, or honor, or anything? Next to the life of the one I loved best and dearest? My beloved, my only Patroclus.”

— Stephen Fry

270. “His reward is the eternal fame that is both priceless and worthless.”

— Stephen Fry

271. “If only at school, geography teachers, surely the most scoffed and pilloried class of pedagogue there is, if only they had concentrated less on rift valleys, trig points and the major exports of Indonesia and more on the fact that geography could promise a classy royal society with the sexiest lecture theatre in the land.”

— Stephen Fry

272. “They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we’re not 100 per cent human, that we’re always letting ourselves down. We’re constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.”

— Stephen Fry

273. “Curiosity has wrongly, by those with a vested interest in ignorance and their own revealed truths, been traduced and eternally characterised as a dangerous felicide, but you, dearest of dear, dear readers, know that Curiosity lights the way to glory.”

— Stephen Fry

274. “I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective. Political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking how effective it might be. I do relish transgression and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy.”

— Stephen Fry

275. “That’s why I love talking and teaching: the act of reproducing ideas out loud reinforces them in the head. If, every time you read a complex book or idea, you had to explain it to someone else, you’d never forget it.”

— Stephen Fry

276. “Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.”

— Stephen Fry

277. “It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.”

— Stephen Fry

278. “His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged, and unchallenging existence had no zest to it.”

— Stephen Fry

279. “Sometimes political correctness exists more in the furious minds of its enemies than in reality, which gets n with compromise and common sense without too much hysteria.”

— Stephen Fry

280. “I’ve never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind.”

— Stephen Fry

281. “I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively.”

— Stephen Fry

282. “The trick of being a good guest is never to ask any questions about the composition of the household. Hosts, even the grandest, are nervous creatures and interpret curiosity as evidence of dissatisfaction.”

— Stephen Fry

283. “You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.”

— Stephen Fry

284. “Is that where it all went wrong? Or is it where it all went right?”

— Stephen Fry

285. “The Greeks created gods that were in their image; warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate, but vengeful.”

— Stephen Fry

286. “My lifelong battle to control cabling began at this time. All the cables I have ever owned would stretch to the moon and back. Except they would not be able to because they would fail to connect up with each other. Anyone can write a story in which humans can teleport, travel in time and make themselves invisible A future in which there are cable compatibility standards, that would be real science fiction.”

— Stephen Fry

287. “Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.”

— Stephen Fry

288. “But this is England, where the only crime is to be Found Out.”

— Stephen Fry

289. “There are people like me who just seem to be made of tweed.”

— Stephen Fry

290. “Painters, poets and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind’s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.”

— Stephen Fry

291. “Since my earliest years I felt nothing but shame for the useless casing of flesh I inhabit.”

— Stephen Fry

292. “With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise.”

— Stephen Fry

293. “Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship’.”

— Stephen Fry

294. “My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy.”

— Stephen Fry

295. “Of course the Greeks were not the only people to weave a tapestry of legends and lore out of the puzzling fabric of existence.”

— Stephen Fry

296. “Not every line of Hamlet is a jewel. nor every square inch of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling worthy of admiring gasps.”

— Stephen Fry

297. “The rescue of Aethra and the sparing of Antenor – can be registered as the only lights of clemency an honour that shone during that night of unnameable atrocities.”

— Stephen Fry

298. “And for the first time I looked into his eyes. They were blue, not light blue, but a darker blue. Not so dark as sapphire blue, not so bright as china blue. They were romantically blue. Lyrically blue. They swam and I swam in them.”

— Stephen Fry

299. “If that she-bear had eaten the baby it found o n the mountaintop instead of nursing it, how different the world would now have been.”

— Stephen Fry

300. “Don’t go looking for something psychological that isn’t there. I have a bath after any kind of strenuous exercise. It doesn’t mean I feel dirty,” though he did, “it doesn’t mean I’m trying to wash you out of my life,” though he was, “it doesn’t mean guilt, shame, repentance or anything like that,” though it did. “It just means I want a bath.”

— Stephen Fry