Stephen Fry Quotes

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

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

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

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

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.”

“To be human means to be constantly in the grip of opposing emotions, to daily reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but I need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite, too.”

“You are who you are when nobody's watching.”

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

“Do not do what you want to do, but what you judge your enemy least wants you to do.”

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

“Have faith in what music can do.”

“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.”

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

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

“What walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three in the evening?”

“You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Dreams were told to priests on the morning after an overnight stay (known as an incubation) and Asclepius himself often manifested to patients. Especially, I believe, to those who paid the most.”

“For the world seems never to offer anything worthwhile without also providing a dreadful opposite.”

“Gaia listened carefully to this wise counsel and - as we all do, whether mortal or immortal - ignored it.”

“Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable.”

“It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying.”

“The Greeks created gods that were in their image; warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate, but vengeful.”

“When lust descends, discretion, common sense and wisdom fly off and what may seem cunning concealment to one in the grip of passion looks like transparently clumsy idiocy to everyone else.”

“˜Could do better’ is a meaningless conclusion. ‘Could be happier’ is the only one that counts.”