Quotes from Stephen Fry

Thoroughly Thought Through

As all travellers know, the experience of a foreign country teaches about your own.

When she told him the news he hugged her and hugged her and they danced around the palace making so much noise that Helios banged on the walls and grumbled that some people had to be up before dawn.

This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

Well, there is one thing. Perhaps you could change the child's name." "Change his name?" said Amphitryon. "How would that help?" "If you were to call him 'Hera's glory' for instance? 'Hera's pride.'" And so it was decided. From now on Alcides would be called Heracles.

Smyrna's baby grew up to be a youth of the most unparalleled physical attractiveness. Oh dear, I've written this too many times for you to believe me again.

because long dresses are stupid and impractical.

Marsyas skidded to a halt, the assorted satyrs, fauns, and Maenads behind bumping into him and each other in a concertina of confusion.

In the early days of gods and men, the divine trod the earth with mortals, befriended them, ravished them, coupled with them, punished them, tormented them, transformed them into flowers, trees, birds, and bugs, and in all ways interacted, intersected, intertwined, interbred, interpenetrated, and interfered with us.

I had a disturbing dream last night. Most disturbing. Would you like to hear it?" "Absolutely," lies Zeus, who has, in common with us all, a horror of hearing the details of anyone else's dreams.

There are people like me who just seem to be made of tweed.

Someone once said that all autobiography is a form of revenge. It can also be a form of thank-you letter.

America's oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr, and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honor.

The discarded animals—the failures—had been the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the camel, the donkey, and the zebra, each one getting closer to the perfect dimensions, beauty, and balance of the horse.

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

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.

Art matters. Happiness matters. Love matters. Good matters. Evil matters. Slam the fridge door. They are the only things that matter and they are of course precisely the things that science goes out of its way to ignore.

POLYHYMNIA was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry, and rhetoric as well as—slightly randomly one might think—agriculture, pantomime, geometry, and meditation. I suppose today we would call her "the Muse of mindfulness.

I would recommend to anyone Professor Alan Bullock's definitive Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Daniel Goldhagen's brilliant Hitler's Willing Executioners as well as the above mentioned Those Were the Days.

Not every line of Hamlet is a jewel. nor every square inch of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling worthy of admiring gasps.

In South Carolina listening to Gullah-speakers sing spiritials] As with bluegrass in Tennessee I am reminded once more of the extraordinary power that comes from music that is played in the place where it was born.

Do "superego" and "id" reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? Evolutionary behavioralism and ethology may tell us more about who and how we are as scientific fact, but the poetic concentration of our traits into the personalities of gods, demons, and monsters are easier for some of us dull-witted ones to hold in our heads than the abstractions of science.

We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game man ever devised. Of course I'll cunting well cheat.

Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once.