110+ Stephen Fry Quotes On Being Offended, Witty And Erudite

Stephen Fry is a British comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist. He is well known for his roles in Blackadder, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, and QI. He is also a prolific author, having written several novels, memoirs, and books on language and technology. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Stephen Fry on life, being offended, witty.

Top 10 Stephen Fry Quotes

1. You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.
2. Estate agents: like them or loathe them, you'd be mad not to loathe them.
3. Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books
4. Nothing in this world is at it seems. Except, possibly, porridge.
5. As I say I don't want to kill myself, I just wouldn't mind dying.
6. All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness
7. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.
• If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?
• I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.
• I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone.
• In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.
• Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.
• An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
• Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.
• When you've seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.
• Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

Stephen Fry Quotes About Life

I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since. — Stephen Fry

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

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 you know as Kipling put it. [...] To fill every unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run. — Stephen Fry

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

Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days. — 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

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

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality. — Stephen Fry

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books. — Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes About English

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

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

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

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

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

If there is a sort of national American emotion I would call it optimism. If there is an English one I would call it embarrassment - not even pessimism - just sheer shame, embarrassment and confusion. — Stephen Fry

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

Stephen Fry Quotes About Books

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

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

Stephen Fry Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — 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

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. — Stephen Fry

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — Stephen Fry

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. — 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. — Stephen Fry

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

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

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

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

Cheat? Good heavens, this is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I'm an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game ever devised. Of course I'll cunting well cheat. Now, give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me. — Stephen Fry

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

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. — Stephen Fry

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. — 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

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

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

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

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. — Stephen Fry

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

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

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

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

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? — Stephen Fry

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

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

I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday... Mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me. — Stephen Fry

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

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

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face. — Stephen Fry

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

Like vichyssoise, revenge is a dish best served cold. — Stephen Fry

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

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. — Stephen Fry

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like. — Stephen Fry

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

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

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

Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick? — Stephen Fry

I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all. — Stephen Fry

Entry is not equivalent to possession. — Stephen Fry

I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in. — Stephen Fry

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

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

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. — Stephen Fry

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

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

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

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.' — Stephen Fry

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

All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies.... God, if there's a word that drives me mad it's "energy" used in a nonsensical way-don't get me started! — Stephen Fry

The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies. — Stephen Fry

And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm. — Stephen Fry

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

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary. — Stephen Fry

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. — Stephen Fry

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

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

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

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. — Stephen Fry

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

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet. — Stephen Fry

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

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. — Stephen Fry

Places of incredible glamour, possibility, power, excitement and pleasure. Love your libraries! — Stephen Fry

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

Life Lessons by Stephen Fry

1. Stephen Fry encourages us to be open-minded and to embrace different perspectives. He also encourages us to be kind and to treat others with respect. Lastly, he reminds us to be grateful for the small things in life and to be mindful of our own happiness.
2. Stephen Fry teaches us to be resilient and to never give up on our dreams, no matter how hard the journey may be. He also encourages us to be honest and to always strive to be the best version of ourselves.
3. Stephen Fry reminds us to be humble and to always be willing to learn and grow. He also encourages us to be generous and to help others whenever we can. Lastly, he teaches us to find joy in the little things and to always be thankful for what we