Stephen Fry famous quotes

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

#Friendship #Loneliness #Weather

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

#Miracle #Age

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

#Eight #Tone #Comedy

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

#Thinking #People #Apes

You are who you are when nobody's watching.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Beauty #Depression #Laughter

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Self #Expression #People

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

#Beautiful #Children #Nice

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Greek #Envious #Divine

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

#Mother #Suicide #Teenager

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#War #Ideas #Greek

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

#People

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

#Believe #Thinking #Staggering

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

#Book #Technology #Elevators

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Believe #Atheism #Humanist

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Uncles #Kindness #Commitment

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

#Running #Distance #Stupid

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
-- Stephen Fry

#Nice #Sleep #Thinking

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Believe #Names #Intellectual

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

#Sorry #Book #Self

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

#Philosophy #Thinking #Afterlife

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Running #Spiritual #Kindness

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Regret #Government #Victory

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

#Want #Spirited #Want U

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

#Funny #Witty

Things are always worse in the steady watches of the night.
-- Stephen Fry

#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?
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Alcohol #Guarantees #Levels

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

#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...
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Growing Up #Thinking #People

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Giving #People #Want

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Want #Kingdoms #World

Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist
-- Stephen Fry

#Sexy #Racist #Sexist

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

#Never Quit #Sexuality

Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.
-- Stephen Fry

#Failing #Foolish

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Teenage #Writing #Years

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Boys #Style #Matter

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Passion #Gay #Eight

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Thinking #Keys #Laughing

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Believe #Dirty #Thinking

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Philosophy #Live Your Life #Way

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Character #Greatness #Thinking

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Jobs #Stupid #People

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Lazy #Way #Wasting Time

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

#Art #Wine #Useless

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

#Thinking #Important #Way

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

#Spiritual #Essence #Use

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Stupidity #Guarantees #Authenticity

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

#Believe #Eye #Thinking

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

#Misunderstood #Want #Complaining

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Stars #Believe #Thinking

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Real #Heart #Blood

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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".
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Believe #Feelings #Lost

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.
-- Stephen Fry

#Being Happy #Path #Intellect

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

#Teacher #Book #Wine

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

#Discovery #Age #Modern

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.
-- Stephen Fry

#Two #Fool #Compromise

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

#Civilization #World #Destruction

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#War #Mistake #Military

I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Actors #Kind #Film

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

#Cutting #Glasses #Fool

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Stars #Kind #Film

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

#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."
-- Stephen Fry

#Agents #Packaging #Privilege

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Believe #Impact #Choices

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

#Ignorance #People #World

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

#Afterlife #People #Inspire

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

#Depression #Wall #Black

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Men #Childhood #Important

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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."
-- Stephen Fry

#Sex #Animal #Ignorant

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

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Weapons #Faces #Language

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.
-- Stephen Fry

#Jobs #Sex #Believe

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

#Passion #Thinking