Quotes from Stephen Fry

We achieve immortality not through ambrosia and ichor but through history and reputation. Through statues and epic song.

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

It was a Tuesday in February. Many my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved.

She loved him, in fact; his violence and strength appealed to some deep part of her. He in turn grew to love her, so far as such a violent brute was capable of the emotion. Love and war, Venus and Mars, have always had a strong affinity. No one quite knows why, but plenty of money has been made trying to find an answer.

We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects.

Remember, cautioned the centaur. Modesty. Observance of the gods. In a fight do not do what you want to do, but what you judge you're enemy least wants you to. You cannot control others if you cannot control yourself. Those who most understand their own limitations have the fewest.

Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos.

You see?' said Prometheus. 'It is your fate to be Heracles the hero, burdened with labours, 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.

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.

You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture

Between funny and witty Falls the shadow

Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It's that kind of fight. ... And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it.

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.

It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

Counterintuitively, self-hatred is one of the leading symptoms of clinical narcissism. Only by telling yourself and the world how much you hate yourself can you receive the reliable shower of praise and admiration in response that you feel you deserve Ã¢â'¬Â¦ 

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress at all? What is the point? Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it.

I flicked my eyes over to Steve again and saw him straighten. He would need a diversion just to start. "Explanations?" I bellowed. "Explanations? There's your explanation…there!" I stabbed a finger dramatically towards the far corner of the room. Pathetic, really. I mean, talk about the oldest trick in the book. But it's a good book, and the trick would have been cut from subsequent editions if it didn't sometimes work.

Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god's chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.

Do not do what you want to do, but what you judge your enemy least wants you to do

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.

It's enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.