Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “You want poetry, first you have to muck in with humanity, you have to fight with paper and pencil for weeks and weeks until your heart bleeds: verses aren’t channelled into your head by angels or muses or sprites of nature.”

— Stephen Fry

252. “Such attitudes are grotesque, impudent and irrelevant. ‘Could do better’ is a meaningless conclusion. ‘Could be happier’ is the only one that counts.”

— 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. “It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.”

— Stephen Fry

255. “If you have been, I’m glad you’ve stopped.”

— Stephen Fry

256. “A film star is a kind of public monument, and everyone’s staring at them, and they’ve kind of got railings around them, and they’re rather miserable most of the time.”

— Stephen Fry

257. “And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm.”

— Stephen Fry

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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. “Remember, cautioned the centaur. Modesty. Observance of the gods. In a fight do not do what you want to do, but what you judge you’re enemy least wants you to. You cannot control others if you cannot control yourself. Those who most understand their own limitations have the fewest.”

— Stephen Fry

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

270. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

272. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

274. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

276. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

283. “This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.”

— Stephen Fry

284. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “You cannot control others if you cannot control yourself. Those who most understand their own limitations have the fewest.”

— Stephen Fry

297. “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

298. “I always feel a fool when in the company of people who work for a living. It brings out my startling lack of common sense.”

— Stephen Fry

299. “The fool doth think he is wise, yet it is the wise man that knows himself to be the fool As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1.”

— Stephen Fry

300. “Few people in one’s life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible.”

— Stephen Fry