This species, the mute swan, became holy to Apollo. In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton the bird is silent all its life until the very moment of its death, when it sings with terrible melancholy its strange and lovely goodbye, its swan song. In honour of Cygnus the young of all swans are called ‘cygnets’.

— Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry Quotes

They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all.

— Stephen Fry

Although Achilles wore no armour, the mere sight of him, standing high on the embankment, bathed in an unearthly light and uttering the most piercing and monumental battle-cry was enough to scatter the Trojans. Three times Achilles yelled his terrible war cry. The Trojans and even their horses were filled with fear. In triumph the Achaeans bore the body of Patroclus back to their camp.

— Stephen Fry

Am I the same person i was fifty years ago? Every molecule and cell of my body has been replaced many times over.

— Stephen Fry

Myth can be a kind of human algebra, which makes it easier to manipulate truth about ourselves.

— Stephen Fry

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.

— Stephen Fry

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.

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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.

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

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.

— Stephen Fry

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.

— Stephen Fry

He bought a couch that he adorned with silks of Tyrian purple. He lay her upon it and sang ballads to her. Like most great visual artists he was an incompetent musician and a deplorable poet.

— Stephen Fry

Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness, and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad, and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.

— Stephen Fry

The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.

— Stephen Fry

The poor bloody poet can no longer say “ope” for “open,” or “swain” for “youth,” he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse.

— Stephen Fry

Zelfs de onsterfelijke goden waren niet bij machte zich te verhouden tot, mee te leven met, nakomelingen te verwekken bij en het lot te bepalen van zo’n aanzwellende schare eerzuchtige, vernuftige en egocentrische wezens.

— Stephen Fry

Poseidon presented Amphitrite with the very first dolphin.

— Stephen Fry

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

— Stephen Fry

Many argue, pointing out that the majority of top chefs are male and while I accept that I could never hope to compete with their colourful turns of phrase, I maintain that when it comes to good, traditional, edible cuisine what you really need is a woman. And a can opener. And a microwave.

— Mrs. Stephen Fry

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.

— Stephen Fry
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