Stephen Fry quotes

Stephen Fry is a British writer, actor, comedian, and presenter, widely celebrated for his wit and intellect. His career spans television, film, theater, and literature, with notable works including "A Bit of Fry & Laurie" and "QI." He is also known for his advocacy on mental health and LGBTQ+ rights. Here are 142 of his quotes:

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

Stephen Fry

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

Stephen Fry

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

Stephen Fry

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

Stephen Fry

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

Stephen Fry

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

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry on being gay 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

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

Stephen Fry

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

Stephen Fry

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

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

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.

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

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

Stephen Fry

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

Stephen Fry

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

Stephen Fry

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

Stephen Fry

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

Stephen Fry

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

[On libraries] What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop... You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh!

Stephen Fry

I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.

Stephen Fry

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

Stephen Fry