Quotes from Stephen Fry

The service took place on one of those afternoons that occur only in the past.

When you do not understand how something works it is perhaps natural to question and to doubt.

We have 18 or 19 plays by Euripides, for example, yet he is known to have written almost 100. Only 7 of Aeschylus's 80 remain, while just 7 plays of Sophocles have come down to us out of 120 known titles. Almost every character you come across when reading the Greek myths had a play about them written by one, other, or all three of the great Athenian masters. The loss of so many of their works might be regarded as the greatest Greek tragedy of them all.

You see?" said Prometheus. "It is your fate to be Heracles the hero, burdened with labors, yet it is also your choice. You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will.

There is such a thing as the power of suggestion, however. One human mind is capable of being hypnotised or persuaded by another. We have faith, we have Hitler, we have advertising.

Think springs of water. Think wells and spas and sources. Well-springs in the widest and loveliest sense. Jerusalem, for instance, is a spring of religiosity. One small town in the desert, but the source of the world's three most powerful faiths. It is the capital of Judaism, the scene of Christ's crucifixion and the place from which Mohammed ascended into heaven. Religion seems to bubble from its sands.

I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn.

I could spend thousands now on the highest end hi-fi in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything quite touch me now as it did then.

I don't think we should be unafraid not to discuss the gay dialectic as an energy and the homophobic constraints that endorse its marginalisation as a functionally reactive discourse.

But, as the saying had it, old professors never die, they merely lose their faculties.

With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise.

Besides, I can hear the beasts stamping and lowing in the back. I'd know their moo anywhere. That baby is a thief and I demand—

Poseidon presented Amphitrite with the very first dolphin.

It is easier to hide a hundred mountains from a jealous wife than one mistress.

Simon Gray, I decided when I first witnessed this frog into prince transformation, did not have a drinking problem. He had a drinking solution.

oneiromancy

I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective. Political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking how effective it might be. I do relish transgression and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy.

The Greeks, if the truth be told, were far too wise to have a consistent eschatology that presumed infallible knowledge of the afterlife. They had noted that no one ever returned from death and took the sane and sensible view that those who claimed to know what happened to a person after they died were either fools or liars.

What the eye doesn't see the stomach doesn't heave over.

For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others.

all nations twist history and cleanse their heroes in order to express an ideal to live up to.

People (even Americans) often find it difficult to talk about themselves.  Poetry gives them a kind of verbal costume in which they can express themselves with more dignity and confidence than the common dress of everyday speech will allow.

I am faced then with two options:  a) a nightclub filled with the rich, beautiful and famous or b) an early night alone in bed with a book.  Never has any decision been easier. The book was gripping.

Curiosity has wrongly, by those with a vested interest in ignorance and their own revealed truths, been traduced and eternally characterised as a dangerous felicide, but you, dearest of dear, dear readers, know that Curiosity lights the way to glory.