Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Not every line of Hamlet is a jewel. nor every square inch of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling worthy of admiring gasps.”

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

304. “Brooding, simmering and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race had yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium?”

— Stephen Fry

305. “HEDYLOGOS – the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentines cards, love-letters and romantic fiction.”

— Stephen Fry

306. “I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language – not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.”

— Stephen Fry

307. “I think I am angrier about that now than I ever was at the time. Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.”

— Stephen Fry

308. “A small proportion to be spent on production, the rest for wine and senseless riot.”

— Stephen Fry

309. “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

310. “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

311. “The numerous moons of Saturn include Titan, Iapetus, Atlas, Prometheus, Hyperion, Tethys, Rhea, and Calypso.”

— Stephen Fry

312. “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

313. “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

314. “To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters – to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.”

— Stephen Fry

315. “And he, despite the gallons of free whisky on offer, was wishing himself violently elsewhere.”

— Stephen Fry

316. “He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.”

— Stephen Fry

317. “It is the destiny of children of spirit to soar too close to the sun and fall no matter how many times they are warned of the danger. Some will make it, but many do not.”

— Stephen Fry

318. “A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves.”

— Stephen Fry

319. “If that kind of poetry doesn’t make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends.”

— Stephen Fry

320. “Creation at this time, peopled as it was by primal deities whose whole energy and purpose seems to have been directed towards reproduction, was endowed with an astonishing fertility. The soil was blessed with such a fecund richness that one could almost believe that if you planted a pencil it would burst into flower.”

— Stephen Fry

321. “The plans of the immortals, however, are as subject to the cruel tricks of Moros as are the plans of mortals.”

— Stephen Fry

322. “She loved him, in fact; his violence and strength appealed to some deep part of her. He in turn grew to love her, so far as such a violent brute was capable of the emotion. Love and war, Venus and Mars, have always had a strong affinity. No one quite knows why, but plenty of money has been made trying to find an answer.”

— Stephen Fry

323. “Everyone else new you ever meet, and this continues through life, is stronger than you are, knows the system better and sees right through to the back of your brain and finds what they see to be wholly inadequate. Everyone you encounter carries, as it were, a huge club behind their back, while all you hold behind yours is a weedy cotton-bud.”

— Stephen Fry

324. “The Olympians enjoy the mauling and brawling of their playthings, their little human pets.”

— Stephen Fry

325. “Civilisation, after all, is not an attitude of mind, it is an attribute of wealth.”

— Stephen Fry

326. “I had a disturbing dream last night. Most disturbing. Would you like to hear it?” “Absolutely,” lies Zeus, who has, in common with us all, a horror of hearing the details of anyone else’s dreams.”

— Stephen Fry

327. “The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know.”

— Stephen Fry

328. “Well, we all know how satisfying it is to recite the shortcomings and hollowness of others – especially those who have money and recognition where we have none. It is certainly more pleasurable than inspecting our own shortcomings.”

— Stephen Fry

329. “Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness, and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad, and unjust. 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

330. “You may be gold, and we poor ordinary men may be of bronze, but ask any solier out there which metal they’d rather have for a sword blae or a spearpoint.”

— Stephen Fry

331. “Men! It’s not that they’re brutish, boorish, shallow and insensitive – though I dare say many are. It’s just that they’re so damned blind. So incredibly stupid. Men in myth and fiction at least. In real life we are keen, clever and entirely without fault of course.”

— Stephen Fry

332. “Ixion had committed one of the first blood murders; unless he was cleansed of his transgression, the Furies would pursue him until he went mad. The princes, lords and neighbouring landowners of Thessaly had cause to dislike Ixion and none offered to perform the catharsis, the ritual process of purification that would redeem him.”

— Stephen Fry

333. “No labour was more Heraclean than the labour of being Heracles.”

— Stephen Fry

334. “Myth can be a kind of human algebra, which makes it easier to manipulate truth about ourselves.”

— Stephen Fry

335. “Pandora’s imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus’s worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise.”

— Stephen Fry

336. “He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than I had supposed. Even more beautiful than I had ever imagined it was possible to imagine imagining beauty. Beautiful in a way that made me realise that I had never even known before what beautiful really meant: not in people, nature, taste or sound.”

— Stephen Fry

337. “Today it was commerce that Europe valued and it was the businessmen who, having exploited what the scientists and thechnologits had done for the world, now reaped the rewards.”

— Stephen Fry

338. “For nine years the Trojan War was more plunder than thunder.”

— Stephen Fry

339. “Princess Diana holds in the threshold for a second longer, checks over her shoulder that her Prince is out of earshot and whispers softly in my ear, ‘Sorry to leave early, though secretly I’m quite glad. It’s Spitting Image tonight, and I want to watch it in my room. They hate it of course. I absolutely adore it.”

— Stephen Fry

340. “Matters of immense import may depend on such issues, but we can never do more than guess the outcomes of the roads we do not take.”

— Stephen Fry

341. “Thoroughly Thought Through.”

— Stephen Fry

342. “His heart lifted to a state approaching something like happiness, however, when he heard, unexpectedly, the sound of Rhea’s low sweet voice humming gently to herself as she came up the slope towards the mountaintop. Loveliest sister and dearest wife! It was quite natural that she had been a little upset by his consumption of their six children, but she surely understood that he had had no choice. She was a Titan, she knew about duty and destiny.”

— Stephen Fry

343. “It is easier to hide a hundred mountains from a jealous wife than one mistress.”

— Stephen Fry

344. “How strange is our mortal zest for fame. Perhaps it is the only way humans can be gods. We achieve immortality not through ambrosia and ichor but through history and reputation. Through statues and epic song.”

— Stephen Fry

345. “What the eye doesn’t see the stomach doesn’t heave over.”

— Stephen Fry

346. “The puzzle that besets me is best expressed by the following statements. a: None of what follows ever happened b: All of what follows is entirely true.”

— Stephen Fry

347. “I would recommend to anyone Professor Alan Bullock’s definitive Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Daniel Goldhagen’s brilliant Hitler’s Willing Executioners as well as the above mentioned Those Were the Days.”

— Stephen Fry

348. “Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog’s bollocks. Nothing else comes close.”

— Stephen Fry

349. “The discarded animals – the failures – had been the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the camel, the donkey, and the zebra, each one getting closer to the perfect dimensions, beauty, and balance of the horse.”

— Stephen Fry

350. “Few heroes die peacefully in their beds after long lives filled with happiness.”

— Stephen Fry