Stephen John Fry is an English actor, comedian, writer, broadcaster, and director. He and Hugh Laurie are the comic double act Fry and Laurie, who starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. These Stephen Fry quotes will motivate you.
Best Stephen Fry Quotes
- “People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t” ~ Stephen Fry
- “I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God…” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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
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“If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t there more happy people in the world?” ~ Stephen Fry
- “All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, …- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness” ~ Stephen Fry
- “You are who you are when nobody’s watching.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Nothing in this world is at it seems. Except, possibly, porridge.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
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“I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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
- “Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Thank you for your input; I can tell you are struggling towards being interesting.” ~ Stephen Fry
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“As I say I don’t want to kill myself, I just wouldn’t mind dying.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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
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“Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Homosexuals are not interested in making other people homosexuals. Homophobes are interested in making other people homophobes.” ~ Stephen Fry
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“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Stop wanting wealth and fame and start wanting instead to do something well about which you are passionate” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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
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“The email of the species is deadlier than the mail.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “[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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
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“Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “I have Van Gogh’s ear for music” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
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“When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “It’s extremely unlucky to be superstitious, for no other reason than it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
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“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
- “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
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry , Stephen Fry quotes on life
- “I knew I couldn’t believe in God, because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Stupid people like to delude themselves that while they may not be cleveenthusr, 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?” ~ Stephen Fry
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“Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.'” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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-lovingm.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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
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“Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
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“An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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” ~ Stephen Fry
- “The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “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.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “The church has no power over our lives anymore, which is something of a blessing for those who do not enjoy red-hot pokers or iron thumb-screws.” ~ Stephen Fry
