Top 329 Quotes & Sayings by Stephen Fry - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.

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

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

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.

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

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.'

Stupid people like to delude themselves that while they may not be clever, 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?

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.

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.

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.

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

[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.

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.

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.

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.

Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist

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

It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.

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.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

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.

You are who you are when nobody's watching.

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

I'm afraid I don't believe there is such a thing as blasphemy, just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.

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

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

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.

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

Thank you for your input; I can tell you are struggling towards being interesting.

Stop wanting wealth and fame and start wanting instead to do something well about which you are passionate

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.

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.

The email of the species is deadlier than the mail.

I have Van Gogh's ear for music

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

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

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.

I knew I couldn't believe in God, because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook.

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.

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.

All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness

Nothing in this world is at it seems. Except, possibly, porridge.

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.

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.

I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God...

Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone.

How can I tell you what I think until I've heard what I'm going to say?

In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.

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.