Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

314. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

318. “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

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

— 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. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

334. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

340. “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

341. “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

342. “But, as the saying had it, old professors never die, they merely lose their faculties.”

— Stephen Fry

343. “The moment when flowers and fruits are at their fullest and ripest is the moment that precedes their fall, their decay, their rot, their death.”

— Stephen Fry

344. “Thoroughly Thought Through.”

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

346. “We have 18 or 19 plays by Euripides, for example, yet he is known to have written almost 100. Only 7 of Aeschylus’s 80 remain, while just 7 plays of Sophocles have come down to us out of 120 known titles. Almost every character you come across when reading the Greek myths had a play about them written by one, other, or all three of the great Athenian masters. The loss of so many of their works might be regarded as the greatest Greek tragedy of them all.”

— Stephen Fry

347. “Although Achilles wore no armour, the mere sight of him, standing high on the embankment, bathed in an unearthly light and uttering the most piercing and monumental battle-cry was enough to scatter the Trojans. Three times Achilles yelled his terrible war cry. The Trojans and even their horses were filled with fear. In triumph the Achaeans bore the body of Patroclus back to their camp.”

— Stephen Fry

348. “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

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

— Stephen Fry