Quotes About French

In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.

It was announced as a French victory by the French Minister of War. I did not see any sign of victory but only the retreat of the French forces engaged in the battle.

Eddie Izzard is doing his show in French... Will he be able to fake ad-lib as well in other languages? He's been speaking French for a while now, but he's talking about doing his act in German. Haven't the German people suffered enough?

And if you remember the other part of the context is we were then all deceived about the French position and told the French had said they'd veto any second resolution - which wasn't true, we now know.

We once discussed which were the cleanest troops in the trenches, taken by nationalities. We agreed on a descending-order like this: English and German Protestants; Northern Irish, Welsh and Canadians; Irish and German Catholics; Scots; Mohammedan Indians; Algerians; Portugese; Belgians; French. We put the Belgians and French there for spite; they could not have been dirtier than the Algerians and the Portugese.

I'd had a French education for three years, my father being in the army. From 9 to 12, I went to French school. I've been sort of part of the culture, part of the geography, since I was quite young - the imprint was there. And I loved it.

It's true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it's a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.

You know why the French don't want to bomb Saddam Hussein? Because he hates America, he loves mistresses, and he wears a beret. He is French, people.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Oh, I'm not English, I cannot talk on behalf of an English person. I'm French. I can say about French. They are quite emotional, though, and they talk about their emotions

In the past the French came to Germany less with the desire to understand it than with a zealous desire to interpret, to analyze it dispassionately something for which their training at the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the French language superbly equipped them to do.

I only speak a little pigeon French. Just enough to get by with the little French pigeons.

Never say "Au revoir" unless you have been talking French, or are speaking to a French person.

I became a pedant of the form. I did my graduate work in art history and particularly in the history of French satirical cartooning. And that made me aware of what a rich and resilient tradition this seemingly scabrous sacrilegious magazine still represented in French life.

This (French-Kissing) is a really sexy thing to do, according to the French people, although you should bear in mind that they also like to eat snails.

It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.

Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.

Ever since I first visited New Orleans back in '89, I've been intrigued by the French Quarter. I always wanted to set something in the Quarter, whether it was historic or contemporary. Unfortunately, I was always tied up with previous commitments - earlier multiple contracts - and could not get a crack at it.

French was my first language.

My sisters like cooking at my place. It has a bit more room, and the food tastes a little bit better. A big pot of spaghetti and sauce, some warm French bread - works all the time. I think I've been eating pasta for 26 years.

A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

If you look at the Oscars and look at the Best Foreign Language series, you see that the films are coming from everywhere - from Quebec, Israel, Poland, and Belgium. It's not the usual French, German, etc. This category is opening up to socially engaged and political films. I think we're going to see a cross over to the main categories also. It's part of this global environment now and I'm grateful that the Academy is having this window on world cinema.

We're all nothing but unified arrangements of atoms and particles, drifting around, enjoying consciousness every now and then for a second or so before splitting up to become bits and pieces of trees and stars and french fries.

Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.

She reached inside the wide ruffle and pulled out a little vial. “Poison?” asked Lady Maccon, tilting her head to one side. “Certainly not. Something far more important: perfume. We cannot very well have you fighting crime unscented, now, can we?” “Oh.” Alexia nodded gravely. After all, Madame Lefoux was French. “Certainly not.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

Once I caught my dad in front of the TV watching a tennis match, and I realized they were tricking us. Poor guy, he had to sneak in a tennis final - probably the French Open.

It's disrespectful to tell the French in the morning that you're going to reduce the debt, in the evening that you're not going to make any savings, and the next morning, after thinking about it, that you're going to spend more.

From the 15th century to 1688, England and Wales, like Scotland, had been peripheral kingdoms in the European power game, more often at war with each other that with Continental powers, and - except under Oliver Cromwell - scarcely very successful on those occasions when they did engage the Dutch, or the French, or the Spanish.

Franchesca and Sharkey, my French bulldogs, have their own blog. And they are brilliant at it.

The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure, nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest and with freedom.

There's still a bit of a problem, in that so many leading English roles are taken by American or French actresses.

Who hasn't made mistakes? I once french kissed a dog at a party to try to impress what turned out to be a very tall 12 year old.

What Abraham Lincoln had to face was a culturally and politically cohesive bloc of states comprising half the country, refusing to discuss even the limitation of slavery; while he had only the most feeble means of enforcement. The British and the French could do their emancipating at a distance; Lincoln had armed resistance almost literally at his doorstep.

The French people need to have all the facts so they can choose. And I won't be running away from it or hiding from it.

I shall be dark and French and fashionable and difficult. And you shall be sweet and open and English and fair. What a pair we shall be! What man can resist us?

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

I committed myself totally, fully, but I didn't succeed in convincing a majority of French... I didn't succeed in making the values we share win.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, "Detail in History." But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics.

I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

They were singing in French, but the melody was freedom and any American could understand that.

French fries. I have been obsessed with them since I was born. I like big, big steak fries, curly fries, seasoned fries - any kind!

I'm going to Iowa for an award. Then I'm appearing at Carnegie Hall, it's sold out. Then I'm sailing to France to be honored by the French government - I'd give it all up for one erection.

Most of the Ten Commandments are negative. The purpose of law is not to mandate good behavior. That concept comes from the French Revolution.

A certain type of critic doesn't really want French movies to be visual. They think movies started from books and they forgot this part of moviemaking, like Chaplin and Buster Keaton, which I didn't forget.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

It’s the opening of Manderlay in Cannes, and I’m sitting next to this guy who’s writing for a tiny fictitious French paper called ‘On the Sunny Side,’ and he’s writing a review on the film, and he’s obviously bored. Then he tells me about all the cars he owns, and how rich he is, and all these things... So, at a certain point, he says, "So what do you do?" Then I take out this very strange hammer we have in the Danish building business, and I say, "I kill." And then I kill him. It is as stupid as it sounds.