Top 100 Stephen Fry Quotes

#1. I'm afraid I don't believe there is such a thing as blasphemy, just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #46105
#2. As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #87644
#3. The performance of buggery is no more inevitable a part of homosexuality than an orange syllabub is an inevitable part of a dinner: some may clamour for it and instantly demand a second helping, some are not interested, some decide they will try it once and then instantly vomit.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #198309
#4. When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #204012
#5. We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #285108
#6. Money and fame are trashy and don't guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #297893
#7. I never quite dare to believe I'm brave enough to be an artist, but I'm on the side of artists. I think of myself as a bit of a Salieri, looking with longing eyes at Mozart.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #317325
#8. You are who you are when nobody's watching.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #317801
#9. My real dissatisfaction is with my dissatisfaction. How dare I be so discontent? How dare I? Or being discontent why cannot I shut up about it?

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #337853
#10. It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind. - About The Da Vinci Code

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #350542
#11. Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #352997
#12. It was extremely important to show that Wilde's sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #413760
#13. The service took place on one of those afternoons that occur only in the past.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #427806
#14. Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #430662
#15. Why should I be depressed? I've got enough money. I've got a job. People like me. There is no to be depressed. That's at stupid as saying there is no reason to have asthma or there is no reason to have the measles. You know you've got it. It's there. It's not about reason.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #433940
#16. An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #447806
#17. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #472965
#18. Thank you for your input; I can tell you are struggling towards being interesting.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #487654
#19. You should give up.'
'Why?'
'For one thing, you'll live longer.'
'Oh, you don't live longer. It just seems longer.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #513910
#20. Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #514339
#21. Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #567292
#22. The trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result, and cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing, and horrific.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #578533
#23. I have always been an impassioned advocate for the works of Shakespeare. I regard him as one of the most complete miracles of his or any other age.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #581149
#24. It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh ... Robert Schumann has been mentioned ... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath ... some of them with rather grim ends.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #594493
#25. You can almost define a convict as one who lacks precisely the kind of wisdom and self-control necessary to derive long-term advantage from short-term discomfort.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #603141
#26. He's your enemy, Donald!'
'He most certainly is not,' said Trefusis. 'Not unless I say so. He may dearly want to be my enemy, he may beg on bended knee for open hostility of the most violent kind, but it takes two to tangle. I choose my own enemies.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #615698
#27. Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #659120
#28. To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #666939
#29. Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #681937
#30. Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #701668
#31. Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #730338
#32. All gone. All anger quelled, all desire drained, all thirst slaked, all madness past.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #730373
#33. I do like being surprised by directors and producers and being offered parts I would never have considered, including parts that aren't necessarily obvious but which would test me.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #730585
#34. Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is he?

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #733896
#35. When you do not understand how something works it is perhaps natural to question and to doubt.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #743956
#36. Not one word of the following is true

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #774851
#37. If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #779996
#38. Over the years however, my nose grew and grew and it became apparent by the time I was fourteen that, like its owner, it was not growing straight.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #790410
#39. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #790632
#40. A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #801150
#41. I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #863653
#42. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #901812
#43. Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress at all? What is the point?
Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #915290
#44. In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #921701
#45. I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #931207
#46. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #932649
#47. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #939444
#48. I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #942797
#49. Humanism inspires a lot of enthusiasm for everyday life and urges people to be better to one another, to work towards a better future and a common good. If I believed there was an afterlife I would have so much less motive for filling this life with every experience that is offered up to me.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #942831
#50. Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #945500
#51. You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #962001
#52. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1001094
#53. I do think it's important not to be absolutely sure, so sure that you can't reinvent yourself in some way, or at least rediscover the truth of why you think what you think, and not just take it as an assumption.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1011986
#54. People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1012572
#55. I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1019678
#56. Nobody seems to understand that in such matters the tact and sympathy should come from the one who is about to die, not the poor bugger who has to take the news.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1025798
#57. And he, despite the gallons of free whisky on offer, was wishing himself violently elsewhere.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1025905
#58. Because, let's face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1040966
#59. It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1054550
#60. It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1066313
#61. If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1080500
#62. I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1095436
#63. When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1096407
#64. How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that's not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1101785
#65. Could do better' is a meaningless conclusion. 'Could be happier' is the only one that counts.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1168908
#66. A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1217802
#67. It is astonishing how articulate one can become when alone and raving at a radio. Arguments and counter arguments, rhetoric and bombast flow from one's lips like scurf from the hair of a bank manager.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1226688
#68. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #1237242
#69. Supporting the English cricket team is like supporting a second division football team. I support Norwich City football team and when they lose I really don't mind because I expect them to; but when we win I'm so happy - much happier than any Arsenal supporter could ever be.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1248232
#70. Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1248523
#71. The email of the species is deadlier than the mail.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1250311
#72. I suppose that there is no point wasting time being lazy, though of course indolence in a divine way, actually has its advantages.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1262093
#73. countercantabrigianism.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1294049
#74. It's a great privilege just to be in a film not because you're some packaging that some agent has done with the studio exec: "We need a John Travolta film."

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1349444
#75. A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1408929
#76. Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1428358
#77. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #1468882
#78. Poetry is not made to be sucked up like a child's milkshake, it is much better sipped like a precious malt whisky.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1474588
#79. I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1483584
#80. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #1486993
#81. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1517440
#82. Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1558421
#83. What's magical about [bears] is that they just spend one-hundred percent of every minute of every hour of every day being a bear. And a tree-frog spends all of its time being a tree-frog. We spend all our time trying to be somebody else.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1571191
#84. I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1592411
#85. I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1625121
#86. Stop wanting wealth and fame and start wanting instead to do something well about which you are passionate

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1639433
#87. It may be that there is an afterlife and I'll look incredibly stupid, but at least I will have had a crammed pre afterlife, a crammed life, so to me the most important thing is as Kipling put it, to fill every unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1694119
#88. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1696834
#89. I shouldn't be saying this - high treason, really - but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1709985
#90. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #1713666
#91. It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1717904
#92. The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or no they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. "Poppycock" means "soft shit" - from the Dutch, I need scarcely remind you, pappe kak.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1729028
#93. It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1748166
#94. The short answer to that is 'no.' The long answer is 'fuck no.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1752612
#95. I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1755139
#96. A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1770208
#97. 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

Stephen Fry Quotes #1770254
#98. I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1770934
#99. I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry ... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1835120
#100. Wanting to be liked is often a very unlikeable characteristic.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes #1840415

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