Top 380 Stephen Fry Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Know this: we are a long time dead. Life may be short, but it is sweet.”53.”

— Stephen Fry

353. “America’s oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr, and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honor.”

— Stephen Fry

354. “It is the fate of the young never to learn,” the centaur sighed. “I suppose it is arrogance and unwavering self-belief that propels them to their triumphs, just as surely as it is arrogance and unwavering self-belief that unseats them and sends them plummeting to their ends.”

— Stephen Fry

355. “POLYHYMNIA was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry, and rhetoric as well as – slightly randomly one might think – agriculture, pantomime, geometry, and meditation. I suppose today we would call her “the Muse of mindfulness.”

— Stephen Fry

356. “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

357. “Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters, and heroes.”

— Stephen Fry

358. “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

359. “But when the day came, Admetus had a radical change of heart. He realized how much he loved Alcestis and how much less of a life he would have without her. In fact, he now saw that a long and endless existence alone would be worse than death.”

— Stephen Fry

360. “The poet Hesiod says of Eurynome, in a fragment from the eighth century BC: “A marvelous scent rose from her silvern raiment as she moved, and beauty was wafted from her eyes.” No one has ever said anything as wonderful as that about me.”

— Stephen Fry

361. “Marsyas skidded to a halt, the assorted satyrs, fauns, and Maenads behind bumping into him and each other in a concertina of confusion.”

— Stephen Fry

362. “Absolutely,’ lies Zeus, who has, in common with us all, a horror of hearing the details of anyone else’s dreams.”

— Stephen Fry

363. “The poor bloody poet can no longer say “ope” for “open,” or “swain” for “youth,” he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse.”

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

365. “Art matters. Happiness matters. Love matters. Good matters. Evil matters. Slam the fridge door. They are the only things that matter and they are of course precisely the things that science goes out of its way to ignore.”

— Stephen Fry

366. “Wicked men never learn, for wicked men have no interest in myths, legends and stories. If they had they would learn from them and triumph, so we must be glad of their ignorance and dullness of wits.”

— Stephen Fry

367. “I know,” said Helen. “Like all sacred and truly precious objects it is very plain. Only profane things are beautiful.”

— Stephen Fry

368. “Zelfs de onsterfelijke goden waren niet bij machte zich te verhouden tot, mee te leven met, nakomelingen te verwekken bij en het lot te bepalen van zo’n aanzwellende schare eerzuchtige, vernuftige en egocentrische wezens.”

— Stephen Fry

369. “Besides, I can hear the beasts stamping and lowing in the back. I’d know their moo anywhere. That baby is a thief and I demand –.”

— Stephen Fry

370. “Someone once said that all autobiography is a form of revenge. It can also be a form of thank-you letter.”

— Stephen Fry

371. “Poseidon presented Amphitrite with the very first dolphin.”

— Stephen Fry

372. “We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game man ever devised. Of course I’ll cunting well cheat.”

— Stephen Fry

373. “He bought a couch that he adorned with silks of Tyrian purple. He lay her upon it and sang ballads to her. Like most great visual artists he was an incompetent musician and a deplorable poet.”

— Stephen Fry

374. “No, blasphemy only threatens those whose faith in their religion is weak.”

— Stephen Fry

375. “Well, there is one thing. Perhaps you could change the child’s name.” “Change his name?” said Amphitryon. “How would that help?” “If you were to call him ‘Hera’s glory’ for instance? ‘Hera’s pride.’” And so it was decided. From now on Alcides would be called Heracles.”

— Stephen Fry

376. “Nestor considered awhile before speaking, a habit of his that irked many but which guaranteed that nothing foolish ever came from his mouth.”

— Stephen Fry

377. “Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once.”

— Stephen Fry

378. “I don’t think we should be unafraid not to discuss the gay dialectic as an energy and the homophobic constraints that endorse its marginalisation as a functionally reactive discourse.”

— Stephen Fry

379. “Smyrna’s baby grew up to be a youth of the most unparalleled physical attractiveness. Oh dear, I’ve written this too many times for you to believe me again.”

— Stephen Fry

380. “That’s an interesting point,′ said Adrian, ’in the sense of not being interesting at all.”

— Stephen Fry

381. “Oh, to be in England, now that England’s gone. This World Service, this little bakelite gateway into the world of Sidney Box, Charters and Caldecott, Mazawattee tea, Kennedy’s Latin Primer and dark, glistening streets. An.”

— Stephen Fry

382. “Am I the same person i was fifty years ago? Every molecule and cell of my body has been replaced many times over.”

— Stephen Fry

383. “Do “superego” and “id” reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? Evolutionary behavioralism and ethology may tell us more about who and how we are as scientific fact, but the poetic concentration of our traits into the personalities of gods, demons, and monsters are easier for some of us dull-witted ones to hold in our heads than the abstractions of science.”

— Stephen Fry

384. “For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others.”

— Stephen Fry

385. “Think springs of water. Think wells and spas and sources. Well-springs in the widest and loveliest sense. Jerusalem, for instance, is a spring of religiosity. One small town in the desert, but the source of the world’s three most powerful faiths. It is the capital of Judaism, the scene of Christ’s crucifixion and the place from which Mohammed ascended into heaven. Religion seems to bubble from its sands.”

— Stephen Fry

386. “In the early days of gods and men, the divine trod the earth with mortals, befriended them, ravished them, coupled with them, punished them, tormented them, transformed them into flowers, trees, birds, and bugs, and in all ways interacted, intersected, intertwined, interbred, interpenetrated, and interfered with us.”

— Stephen Fry

387. “So perhaps we are all hypocrites. We damn others for what we fear as faults in ourselves. We rehearse the shortcomings of ‘people’ as a means of warding off the evil spirits that threaten us. It is certainly observable that those who most notice another’s excessive drinking, for instance, are those most worried about their own habit.”

— Stephen Fry

388. “I will never forget my puzzlement when, in a vocabulary list, it presented the verb thaumazo, offering this helpful thought: “thaumazo, I wonder, or marvel at. This is easily remembered by thinking of the English word ‘thaumaturge.’” And I suppose that was true, since I’ve never forgotten it.”

— Stephen Fry

389. “I could spend thousands now on the highest end hi-fi in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything quite touch me now as it did then.”

— Stephen Fry

390. “When she told him the news he hugged her and hugged her and they danced around the palace making so much noise that Helios banged on the walls and grumbled that some people had to be up before dawn.”

— Stephen Fry

391. “This is what you have to understand. You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made these friends and those. It was nothing. The future is a much bigger deal than the past, Adrian, a much bigger deal. Not just because it has babies in it, but because there are better people in it, who are better behaved and more fun to be with, the scenery is better, the weather is better, the rewards and thrills are better. But I really am not sure that you will ever...”

— Stephen Fry