Quote

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

Stephen Fry

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Stephen Fry
Age: 68
Born: 1957
Born: January 1
Actor
Autobiographer
Comedian
Director
Film Actor
Film Director
Improviser
Journalist
Narrator
Novelist
Performing Artist
Hampstead Village
Stephen John Fry
Humans
Opposites
Reconcile
Need
Emotions
Opposing
Mean
Daily
Adore
Needs
Constantly
Apparently
Adults
Cherish
Emotion
Adult
Conflicting
Means
Tension
Tensions
Human
Opposite
Grip

More quotes by Stephen Fry

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Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.
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Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.
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Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
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Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.
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Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise.
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As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.
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You've just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.
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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.
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I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
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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.'
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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.
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Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.
Stephen Fry
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People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.
Stephen Fry
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Generally, we admire the thing we are not.
Stephen Fry
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I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying, 'How To Be Happy, by Stephen Fry: Guaranteed Success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say, 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself--and you will be happy.'
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Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they're truly great rather than making you feel that tall they make you feel that tall, that they're greatness as it were improves you.
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Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.
Stephen Fry
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I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.
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It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.
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I believe in kindness and niceness and lots of spiritual things, but the real intellectual rigor and quest of logic is something that I'm afraid takes incredibly hard work and we live in an age in which hard work is if not actively deprecated or denigrated it is run away from or ignored.
Stephen Fry