Stephen Fry Quotes:

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.

Topics: Miracle, Age, Impassioned

Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave.

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.226, Soho Press

Topics: Eight, Tone, Comedy, Homophobes, Euphoria

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.

Topics: Thinking, People, Apes

You are who you are when nobody's watching.

Topics: Self, People, Who You Are

I'm absolute attacking my own instinct for politeness, but I think I admire artists who just speak out or who are strong, so it's very hard.

Topics: Strong, Thinking, Artist

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Topics: Beauty, Depression, Laughter, Self Loathing, Socially Awkward

I like people who are as unlike me as possible, which is not an expression of self disgust or self hatred, but it's just that you know you obviously particularly admire things that you recognize yourself as not having.

Topics: Self, Expression, People, Self Hatred

You can't just say there is a God because well, the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.

Topics: Beautiful, Children, Nice, Under Stress, True Fact

When you take a lot of cocaine powder you tend to take a lot of alcohol with it as well, so for many years really I never went out without at least four or five grams of cocaine powder.

Topics: Years, Alcohol, Four

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

source: - Stephen Fry (2012). “The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography”, p.54, The Overlook Press

Topics: People, Care, Failing

The Greeks understood perfectly that if there were divine beings they are capricious, unkind, malicious mostly, temperamental, envious and mostly deeply unpleasant because that you can say well yes, all right, if there is going to be god or gods then you have to admit that they're very at the very least capricious. They're certainly not consistent. They're certainly not all loving.

Topics: Greek, Envious, Divine, Capricious

I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler's anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian 'correctively' raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself.

Topics: Mother, Suicide, Teenager, History Repeats Itself, Repeating History

There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.

Topics: Nice, Mean, Way

It's hard to be a friend to someone who's depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.

Topics: Lethargy, Being Depressed, People With Depression, Help With Depression

I can understand the Greek idea that there are these these principles of lightening or of war or of wisdom and to embody them, to personify them into a Athena or Aries or whichever god you want makes enormous sense.

Topics: War, Ideas, Greek, Athena

If I were to believe in a god l would believe in gods. I think monotheism is the really ghastly thing. That is the absolutely staggering to me misapprehension.

Topics: Believe, Thinking, Staggering, Monotheism

This is the point. One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

Topics: Book, Technology, Elevators, Reading Books

Atheism comes into rather a bad press and I suppose I'd rather describe myself as a humanist... I don't believe in God. I don't believe there is a God.

Topics: Believe, Atheism, Humanist, Bad Press

I suppose the thing I most would have liked to have known or been reassured about is that in the world, what counts more than talent, what counts more than energy or concentration or commitment, or anything else - is kindness. And the more in the world that you encounter kindness and cheerfulness - which is its kind of amiable uncle or aunt - the better the world always is. And all the big words: virtue, justice, truth - are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness.

Topics: Uncles, Kindness, Commitment, Justice Truth

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.

Topics: Running, Distance, Stupid, Unforgiving, Kipling

One of the nice things about looking at a bear is that you know it spends 100 per cent of every minute of every day being a bear. It doesn't strive to become a better bear. It doesn't go to sleep thinking, "I wasn't really a very good bear today". 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

Topics: Nice, Sleep, Thinking, Fulfilment

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

source: - Twitter post from Sep 27, 2012

Topics: Believe, Insecure, Blasphemy

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

Topics: Believe, Names, Intellectual, Baudelaire, Massive

I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying, 'How To Be Happy, by Stephen Fry: Guaranteed Success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say, 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself--and you will be happy.'

Topics: Sorry, Book, Self, Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself, Feeling Sorry

The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn't true you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife.

Topics: Philosophy, Thinking, Afterlife, True You

The people I know who SWEAR THE MOST tend to have the widest vocabularies.

Topics: Vocabulary, People, Swear

I believe in kindness and niceness and lots of spiritual things, but the real intellectual rigor and quest of logic is something that I'm afraid takes incredibly hard work and we live in an age in which hard work is if not actively deprecated or denigrated it is run away from or ignored.

Topics: Running, Spiritual, Kindness, Niceness, Rigor

If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.

Topics: Phrases, Ears, World

If we empower ourselves with responsibility over our actions, responsibility over our destinies and responsibility for directing and maintaining and creating our own ethical and moral frameworks, which is the most important thing really isn't it because perhaps the greatest insult to humanism is this idea that mankind needs a god in order to have a moral framework.

Topics: Responsibility, Destiny, Order

As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

Topics: Regret, Government, Victory

If there were a God he would want us to be better spirited than to take his word for everything.

Topics: Want, Spirited, Want U

I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

Topics: Funny, Witty, Don't Need You, Bladder, I Don't Need You

Things are always worse in the steady watches of the night.

Topics: Night, Watches, Steady

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?

Topics: Believe, Atheism, Assumption

The most natural way you would attempt to cope with something inside you that is affecting your moods and your energy levels is to intervene with chemicals to help and because medical science hasn't come up with pharmaceuticals that do particularly well you tend to reach for the chemicals that are outside the Pharma counter, i.e. narcotics and alcohol because they can guarantee your mood more or less.

Topics: Alcohol, Guarantees, Levels, Energy Levels, Medical Science

A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling.

Topics: Cousin, Humorous, Bikers

You don't get depressed because bad things happen to you. That's getting pissed off and annoyed. That's reasonable. Someone hits you in the face you go ow, you know that's... but depression is something that happens like weather to you inside you...

Topics: Weather, Annoyed, Faces

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

Topics: Garden, Tree, Wickedness

I think people talk about one love, but there is the need to love and the need to be loved are not the same thing and I suppose that's... and it's working that out is part of growing up.

Topics: Growing Up, Thinking, People

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.

Topics: Writing, Two, Mixtures

Most of the problem I see amongst friends and I've experienced amongst myself is when people haven't accommodated the inequality that they want, they haven't understood that their partner wants to give more love and receive less or they haven't understood that their partner wants to receive more, but sort of give less.

Topics: Giving, People, Want

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

Topics: Rooms, Common, Realising

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.

Topics: Want, Kingdoms, World

Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist

Topics: Sexy, Racist, Sexist

I've always been aware of my sexuality, but I never quite knew what it meant...

Topics: Never Quit, Sexuality

Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

source: - Stephen Fry (2012). “The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography”, p.54, The Overlook Press

Topics: Failing, Foolish

As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they're upset by the weirdness of their own family.

Topics: Children, Thinking, Upset

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

Topics: Teenage, Writing, Years, Benign, Tropes

As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.

Topics: Boys, Style, Matter, Does It Matter

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

Topics: Laughter, Thinking, Sickness

The concept that really gets the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomachs is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love. That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the world's full octave. Love as Agape, Eros and Philos; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.

Topics: Passion, Gay, Eight, Homophobes, Euphoria

What makes a good family? Well, I suppose obviously love. Love lubricated often I think by humor. I think a family that can laugh at each other and tease themselves and who are able to be jolly with each other I think is the key.

Topics: Thinking, Keys, Laughing, Jolly

I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I'm sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn't lust after Psyche.

Topics: Believe, Dirty, Thinking, Eros

Philosophy is an odd thing... There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

Topics: Philosophy, Live Your Life, Way, Socratic

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

Topics: Pregnancy, Book, Writing

Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they're truly great rather than making you feel that tall they make you feel that tall, that they're greatness as it were improves you.

Topics: Character, Greatness, Thinking

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

Topics: Comedy, Unfaithful, Cliche

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.

Topics: Jobs, Stupid, People, Asthma, Measles

As I say I don't want to kill myself, I just wouldn't mind dying.

Topics: Depression, Mind, Dying

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

Topics: Lazy, Way, Wasting Time, Being Lazy

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.

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.298, Soho Press

Topics: Art, Wine, Useless, Wine Love, Useless Things

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.

Topics: Thinking, Important, Way, Reinventing Yourself

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

Topics: Spiritual, Essence, Use, Indelible, Numinous

I certainly don't want to be formulaic. I want to be honest and authentic and everything else.

Topics: Want, Honest, Being Honest

Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.

Topics: Stupidity, Guarantees, Authenticity, Superficiality, Probity

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.

Topics: Believe, Eye, Thinking, Salieri

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

Topics: Misunderstood, Want, Complaining, Being Misunderstood

After the shooting of John Lennon and the early death of so many great stars and the utter naked venal mercantile marketing of pop music and rock music, I don't think anyone really believes that music is anything more than another commodity.

Topics: Stars, Believe, Thinking, Early Death

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.

Topics: Real, Heart, Blood, Quiver, Real Power

Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.

Topics: Men, Discovery, Order

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 ever devise".

Topics: Pain, Joy, Sensual

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.

Topics: Believe, Feelings, Lost

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

Topics: Being Happy, Path, Intellect

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

Topics: Teacher, Book, Wine, Banter

I suppose the thing that really interests me is what mankind did with the big, big, big discoveries that have created our modern age.

Topics: Discovery, Age, Modern, Modern Age

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

Topics: Two, Fool, Compromise, Stalling

Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it's an endless stalemate.

Topics: Civilization, World, Destruction, Coming To An End, Stalemate

Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else

Topics: Shining, Sun, Teeth

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.

Topics: War, Mistake, Military, Fatal Mistakes

I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.

Topics: Depression, May

I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind.

Topics: Actors, Kind, Film, Film Stars

A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there

Topics: Cutting, Glasses, Fool, Unsuspecting

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.

Topics: Stars, Kind, Film

Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers

Topics: Friendly, Milk, Noses

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."

Topics: Agents, Packaging, Privilege

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

Topics: Professors, Faculty

Humanism is an approach to life which encourages ethical and fulfilling living on the basis of reason and humanity, and rejects superstition and religion. The most immediate impact of living as a Humanist is that we believe this life is all there is - so what we do and the choices we make really count.

Topics: Believe, Impact, Choices, Humanism

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?

source: - "QI: Albania". TV Series, www.imdb.com. 2003.

Topics: Ignorance, People, World, Ignorance Is Bliss, Stupidity And Ignorance

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.

Topics: Afterlife, People, Inspire, Common Good, Humanism

There comes a time when the blankness of the future is just so extreme, it's like such a black wall of nothingness. Not of bad things like a cave full of monsters and so, you're afraid of entering it. It's just nothingness, the void, emptiness and it is just horrible. It's like contemplating a future-less future and so you just want to step out of it. The monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you.

Topics: Depression, Wall, Black, Blankness, Monstrosity

The part of [Oscar] Wilde was exceptionally important to me; the man, his achievements, his wisdom, but his downfall, his disgrace and the tragic and bitter end to it have always fascinated, appalled and attracted me since childhood. It was he who first in some measure vindicated my sexuality.

Topics: Men, Childhood, Important, Wilde, Vindicated

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.

Topics: Fall, Writing, Wish

Zoologists have reckoned there are up to at least 750 species of animal that have been observed exhibiting same-sex behaviour, or gender role transformation (which is very common in a wide range of fauna). There is only one species on earth, however, which has exhibited homophobia or transphobia. And that is the species ***** sapiens sapiens. Us. So let's not allow the foolish, ignorant or bigoted ever to use words like "natural."

Topics: Sex, Animal, Ignorant, Gender Roles, Homophobia

You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

Topics: Height, Six, Reason

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.

Topics: Tests, Directors, Obvious

The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.

Topics: Weapons, Faces, Language, Arsenal

My general view is that best actor best suited to role should get the job. Obviously when it comes to colour and issues of ethnicity the choice is clear. But I do not believe you have to be transgender or have undergone sex reassignment surgery to be able play a character who has.Acting is acting after all.

Topics: Jobs, Sex, Believe

I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.

Topics: Passion, Thinking

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

Topics: Funny, Witty, Book, Libraries And Librarians, Original Ideas

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.

Topics: Gay, Long, Matter, Being Accepted

Living with bipolar, schizophrenia or any other mental condition takes a recognition that one has a chronic condition that needs managing. The management can be through pharmaceutical intervention, talk therapy, mindfulness programmes, diet and exercise changes, all kinds of things.

Topics: Exercise, Bipolar, Mindfulness, Diet And Exercise

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

Topics: Inspirational, Book, Reading

Where LGBT and mental health issues collide is over stigma. And stigma is society's problem not the problem of the LGBT or mental health community. What we have to deal with is the ignorance, fear and prejudice that blight the lives of those who have nothing wrong with them in any moral or transgressive sense. It is society that is ill.

Topics: Ignorance, Issues, Community, Blight, Stigma

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

Topics: Tolerance, Lovers, Language

I met too frankly preposterous, if it weren't for their banal evil, politicians and pastors who told knowing lies about the evils of homosexuality in order to attract bigger flocks to their churches and more votes and power to their corrupt councils. LGBT people seem to be being scapegoated more and more just as at the same time in more enlightened countries more and more freedom to express themselves, marry, be given official intersex status and so on is offered.

Topics: Country, Lying, Order, Intersex

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

Topics: Clothes, Language

Money and fame are trashy and don't guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it.

Topics: Guarantees, Fame, Refuse, Money And Fame

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.

source: - "Stephen Fry reveals new BBC TV series" by Tim Lusher, www.theguardian.com. July 20, 2010.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Verbs

I think I'm most nervous about revealing how nervous I have always been. People think me calm, confident, poised. Inside I'm a jelly...

Topics: Thinking, People, Jelly

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Topics: Art, Thinking, Talking

My secret is that I have never thought there is a secret to anything in life. Passion. Love. Drive. Work. Work. Work. Dull but true.

source: - "Stephen Fry, British Polymath: A Twinterview". Interview with Johann Hari, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 15, 2010.

Topics: Passion, Secret, Dull, Anything In Life

One of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you're never going to match up and that everybody else's life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day, or you were somehow not invited. And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you.

Topics: Secret, Lessons, Taught, Wilde, Dental

My first words, as I was being born [...] I looked up at my mother and said, 'that's the last time I'm going up one of those.

Topics: Mom, Mother, Lasts

All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness

Topics: Kindness, Greatness, Justice, Justice Truth

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.

Topics: Inspirational, Friendship, Sympathy, Lethargy, Blackness

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.284, Soho Press

Topics: People

Nothing in this world is at it seems. Except, possibly, porridge.

source: - Twitter post from Apr 15, 2014

Topics: Fun, World, Porridge, Just For Fun

Thank you for your input; I can tell you are struggling towards being interesting.

Topics: Struggle, Interesting, Input

In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.

source: - Stephen Fry (2014). “The Hippopotamus”, p.13, Soho Press

Topics: Sapphires, Gleam, Plastic

The email of the species is deadlier than the mail.

Topics: Email, Mail, Species

What other developed democracy has such a ridiculous and squalid history of intolerance? From the imprisonment and roasting of heretics, witches and poachers, to the censorship of literature, art and television: from St Alban through Wilde, Joyce and Lawrence I think we can point with pride to as grim a catalogue of intemperate, bigoted repression as any nation on earth.

Topics: Art, Pride, Thinking, Repression, Poachers

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

Topics: Real, Library, Rooms, Real Education

I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone.

source: - "From Nicole Scherzinger beating bulimia to David Beckham's OCD - stars and mental health struggles" by Francesca Cookney, www.mirror.co.uk. July 2, 2014.

Topics: Cousin, Want, Knows, My Cousin

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.

Topics: Tree, Trying, Frogs

[My best tip for overcoming depression is] to regard it as being like the weather. It's not your responsibility that it's raining, but it is real when it rains, and the fact that it's raining does not mean that the rain is never going to stop. The only thing to do is to believe that, one day, it won't be raining and accept it so you can find a mental umbrella to shield yourself from the worst. The sun will eventually come up.

Topics: Real, Rain, Believe, Overcoming Depression

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.101, Soho Press

Topics: Hurt, Broken, Stronger, Sticks And Stones

Oscar Wilde quite rightly said, 'All art is useless'. And that may sound as if that means it's something not worth supporting. But if you actually think about it, the things that matter in life are useless. Love is useless. Wine is useless. Art is the love and wine of life. It is the extra, without which life is not worth living.

Topics: Art, Wine, Mean, Life Is Not Worth Living, Wine And Love

Stop wanting wealth and fame and start wanting instead to do something well about which you are passionate

Topics: Passionate, Wealth, Fame

It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No, we have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic church in a nutshell.

Topics: Sex, Fun, Attitude, Obese, Anorexics

How can I tell you what I think until I've heard what I'm going to say?

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.89, Soho Press

Topics: Knowledge, Thinking, Heard

When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

source: - "Room 101" (Season 6 Episode 10, 2001), (1994–).

Topics: Heart, Secret, Mystery, Science Religion, Human Heart

I have Van Gogh's ear for music

Topics: Ears, Vans

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is 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 that is so full of injustice and pain?

source: - YouTube Chanel "Secular Talk"/ "Stephen Fry Annihilates God", www.youtube.com. January 31, 2015.

Topics: Pain, Stupid, Mean, Capricious

It's extremely unlucky to be superstitious, for no other reason than it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid.

Topics: Stupid, Reason, Unlucky

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

source: - Stephen Fry (2012). “The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography”, p.94, The Overlook Press

Topics: Running, Opportunity, Play

Homosexuals are not interested in making other people homosexuals. Homophobes are interested in making other people homophobes.

Topics: People, Homophobes, Homosexual

Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - 'It destroys everything around it, except itself.'

Topics: Thinking, Self, Hatred

Stupid people like to delude themselves that while they may not be clever, they were at least able to compensate with feelings and insights denied to the intellectual....It was precisely this kind of false belief that made stupid people so stupid. The truth was the clever people had infinitely more resources from which to make the leaps of connection that the world called intuition. What was 'intelligence' after all, but the ability to read into things?

Topics: Clever, Stupid, People

Alternative medicine people call themselves "holistic" and say it's the "whole" approach. Well, if it's the whole approach, let it be the mind as well. Use logic, use sense, use the incredible five wits you were given by creation.

source: - "Room 101" (Season 6 Episode 10, 2001), (1994-).

Topics: Medicine, People, Mind, Alternative Medicine, Holistic

I shouldn't be saying this, high treason really, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there.

source: - "Some British actors are overrated by Hollywood, claims Fry" by Maev Kennedy, www.theguardian.com. March 20, 2007.

Topics: May, Sometimes, Wonder, Brilliance

There's nothing worse than the British in one of their fits of morality.

source: - "Stephen Fry: Public anger over MPs’ expenses is ‘revolting’" by Jessica Geen, www.pinknews.co.uk. May 22, 2009.

Topics: Morality, Fit, British

Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.

source: - Stephen Fry (2012). “The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography”, p.52, The Overlook Press

Topics: Lectures, Students, Teach

I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all ... the Trump Taj Mahal. For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions along the boardwalk.- It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly.

source: - Stephen Fry, Vanda Vucicevic (2008). “Stephen Fry in America”, Harpercollins Pub Ltd

Topics: Butterfly, Names, Brave, Boardwalks, Taj Mahal

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.

Topics: Beach, Knowing, People

I knew I couldn't believe in God, because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook.

source: - Stephen Fry (1997). “Moab is My Washpot: An Autobiography”, Random House Incorporated

Topics: Believe, Believe In God, Outlook

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

Topics: Depression, Giving, Tears, Summoning

Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.

source: - Stephen Fry (2010). “Paperweight”, p.183, Random House

Topics: Knowing, Done, Known

Naturally I've known girlies form an attachment to the younger male before now, but in the tennis score of the bedroom most girls in my experience would rather Love Thirty or Love Forty than Love Fifteen. Men, of course, are a whole other issue; they start at Love All and stay there until they're dragged from the court

source: - Stephen Fry (1994). “The hippopotamus”, Random House (UK)

Topics: Girl, Men, Issues

I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God...

source: - "Bookclub" BBC Radio 4, www.bbc.co.uk. March 6, 2005.

Topics: Thinking, Faith In God, Harder

[...] I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it. It was alien to me and I to it.

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.52, Soho Press

Topics: World, Firsts, Aliens, Urges

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

Topics: Literature, Planets, Access

The church has no power over our lives any more, which is something of a blessing for those who do not enjoy red-hot pokers or iron thumb-screws.

Topics: Blessing, Iron, Church, Red Hot

...as absurd and dishonest as claiming that the trouble with computer games is that they stop people watching television.

source: - Stephen Fry (2010). “Paperweight”, p.176, Random House

Topics: Games, People, Television, Computer Games

Hey-ho, it's raining inside: it isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow and when it does, I shall take full advantage.

Topics: Rain, Doe, Hey, People With Depression

Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distills an idea.

Topics: Beautiful, Ideas, Wit

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.

source: - Stephen Fry (2006). “The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within”, p.551, Penguin

Topics: London, Sacred, Royal, Barbaric

Mind you, Mount Rushmore isn't exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either. After the naïve daftness of the Crazy Horse monument, I find the pompous idiocy of those four presidents somehow more risible still. Wishing to show respect or feel a vicarious thrill of admiration and pride, I can only giggle. For which I am very sorry. Any loyal American reading this who feels outraged and insulted is free to explode with derisive snorts of laughter at any British equivalent.

Topics: Horse, Sorry, Laughter, Mount Rushmore, Parthenon

Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.

source: - "This much I know". Interview with Geraldine Bedell, www.theguardian.com. August 14, 2005.

Topics: Children, Wall, Knowledge

It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.

Topics: Ideas, People, Facts, Money And Fame, Privileged Life

Not one word of the following is true

source: - Stephen Fry (2010). “The Liar”, p.9, Random House

Topics: Following, One Word

P. G. Wodehouse... used, when in town, to solve the problem of the long walk to the post-office by the simple expedient of tossing his letters out of his window: his belief that the average human, finding a stamped and addressed envelope on the pavement, would naturally pop it into the nearest pillar-box was never once, in decades, shown to be unfounded.

Topics: Simple, Long Walks, Average, Post Office

Generally, we admire the thing we are not.

source: - "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Admire

Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.300, Soho Press

Topics: Sex, Ice, Vodka

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.337, Soho Press

Topics: Splendour, Given, Showers

Weather is real. It is absolutely real: when it rains, it rains – you get wet, there is no question about it. It is also true about weather that you can’t control it; you can’t say if I wish hard enough it won’t rain. It is equally true that if the weather is bad one day it will get better and what I had to learn was to treat my moods like the weather.

Topics: Real, Rain, Weather

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.

Topics: House, Despair, Looks, Blackness

We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen actors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators.

Topics: Hero, Air, Valhalla, Zealot, Pantheon

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.

source: - Stephen Fry's BAFTA annual television lecture, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2010.

Topics: Mean, Opposites, Adults, Conflicting Emotions, Conflicting Ideas

At least 260 species of animal have been noted exhibiting homosexual behavior but only one species of animal ever, so far as we know, has exhibited homophobic behavior - and that's the human being.

Topics: Gay, Animal, Behavior

You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don't. It's not all soft and lovely. It doesn't ask to be loved.

Topics: Oddities, Lovely, Norfolk, Roughness

I shall sustain a massive erection, that’s what, and I shan’t be answerable for the consequences. Some kind of ejaculation is almost bound to ensue and if either of you were to become pregnant I should never forgive myself.

source: - Stephen Fry (2003). “The Liar”, p.16, Soho Press

Topics: Ejaculation, Forgiving, Kind, Never Forgive

Norwich is a fine city. None finer. If there is another city in the United Kingdom with a school of painters named after it, a matchless modern art gallery, a university with a reputation for literary excellence which can boast Booker Prize-winning alumni, one of the grandest Romanesque cathedrals in the world, and an extraordinary new state-of-the-art library then I have yet to hear of it.

Topics: Art, School, Winning, Alumni, Prize Winning

My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.

source: - Stephen Fry (2003). “The Liar”, p.35, Soho Press

Topics: Firsts, Facts, Kind, Charlatans

When push-off comes to shove-off, a man must have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings, something more than the threat of bedsores, at any rate.

source: - Stephen Fry (1994). “The hippopotamus”, Random House (UK)

Topics: Morning, Men, Bed

It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.

source: - "I saw hate in a graveyard - Stephen Fry" by David Smith, www.theguardian.com. June 5, 2005.

Topics: People, Freedom Of Speech, Comedian, Offence, Whiners

If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.

source: - "The Importance of Unbelief". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

Topics: Mistake, Thinking, Clouds, Knowledge And Understanding

We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it.

Topics: Artist, Hands, Talking

I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.

source: - Stephen Fry (2014). “Making History”, p.95, Soho Press

Topics: Art, Book, Writing, Fifteen Years, Art Students

There is something in the American project, something in simple American oratory, something in the hope and idealism of this frustrating and contradictory nation that still makes my spirits soar and my heart leap with optimism and belief. If only they understood how to make a cup of tea.

source: - Stephen Fry, Vanda Vucicevic (2008). “Stephen Fry in America”, Harpercollins Pub Ltd

Topics: Heart, Simple, Optimism

The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.

Topics: Thinking, Swings, People, Mood Swing, Manic Depression

One of the most unattractive human traits, and so easy to fall into, is resentment at the sudden shared popularity of a previously private pleasure. Which of us hasn't been annoyed when a band, writer, artist or television series that had been a minority interest of ours has suddenly achieved mainstream popularity? When it was at a cult level we moaned at the philistinism of a world that didn't appreciate it, and now that they do appreciate it we're all resentful and dog-in-the-manger about it.

source: - Stephen Fry (2012). “The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography”, p.204, The Overlook Press

Topics: Dog, Fall, Artist, Resentful

I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.

Topics: Mind, Greedy, Curious

If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Topics: People, Curiosity, Care, Highs And Lows

There are some things I don't like, about which I think, well, that's me. But coriander is a giant hoax perpetrated by a perverted society.

source: - "This much I know". Interview with Geraldine Bedell, www.theguardian.com. August 14, 2005.

Topics: Thinking, America, Giants

Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.

source: - Stephen Fry (2014). “The Hippopotamus”, p.93, Soho Press

Topics: Names, Giving, Laughing

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.

Topics: Believe, Writing, Dark

You've just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.

Topics: Joy

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

Topics: Perfectly Good, Language

I'm afraid I was very much the traditionalist. I went down on one knee and dictated a proposal which my secretary faxed over straight away.

Topics: Love, Knees, Proposal

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.

Topics: Funny, Laughter, Humor

Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy.

source: - Stephen Fry (2006). “The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within”, p.146, Penguin

Topics: Law, Historical, Example, Live Free

Talent is inborn, but technique is learned.

source: - Stephen Fry (2006). “The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within”, p.91, Penguin

Topics: Technique, Talent

It's certainly easy to mock some things ... Oddly enough though I've never found it easy to mock anything of value. Only things that are tawdry and fatuous - perhaps it's just me.

Topics: Funny, Humor, Easy

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.

source: - Stephen Fry (2010). “Paperweight”, p.62, Random House

Topics: Hair, Radio, Flow

I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party.

source: - Stephen Fry (2012). “The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography”, p.125, The Overlook Press

Topics: Party, Tupperware, Found

You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.

Topics: Business, Work, Mba, Ballgame

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

Topics: Comedy, Persons

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

Topics: Intelligent, People, Comedy, Graphic Novels, Graphic

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

source: - "The future's in the past". www.theguardian.com. July 9, 2006.

Topics: Memories, History, Enemy

Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

source: - Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.48, Soho Press

Topics: Sleep, Doors, Sneak In, Uninvited