Popular quotes about French! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 62
French women have been made beautiful by the French people - they're very aware of their bodies, the way they move and speak, they're very confident of their sexuality. French society's made them like that
Charlotte RamplingThe French are not rude. They just happen to hate you. But that is no reason to bypass this beautiful country, whose master chefs have a well-deserved worldwide reputation for trying to trick people into eating snails. Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: 'I bet that if we called this something like `escargot,' tourists would eat it.' Then they had hearty laugh, because 'escargot' is the French word for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm.'
Dave BarryI think the French agonise more about being French, I don't think English think about being English that much. I think the Scottish think about being Scottish and the Welsh think about being Welsh, but the English don't really care. But the French think about it all the time, it's an absolute preoccupation.
Jonathan MeadesIt's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.
David SedarisThe key to the U.N.'s global warming study was man's use of aerosol spray. You have to know the French were involved in a study concluding that Arrid Extra Dry is destroying the Earth. In a world in which everyone smelled, the French would be at no disadvantage. Aerosol spray. How convenient.
Ann CoulterI grew up in France, my first language was French, and I tend to gravitate towards French cooking.
Robert StackThere was [really] little difference between someone acting throwing french fries in your face and someone throwing french fries in your face.
Russell BrandWhen actually, you have one identity made of different parts. Depending on where you are, at what time in your life, some things are higher or deeper. That's what I understood later: that I'm French and Tunisian, and I'm accepting the French part of my identity.
eL SeedAntiwhite racism is developing in sections of our cities where individuals - some of whom have French nationality - contemptuously designate French people as gaulois on the pretext they don't share the same religion, color or origins.
Jean-Francois CopeFrench novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.
Lafcadio HearnI took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.
Dave BarryThe film The Conquest will be seen on many different levels and the American point of view is always more technical. The French are less technical - it's 'I like it, or I don't like it.' I hope that this film can have a life in the U.S. - it's the grand country of cinema. I grew up with Hollywood movies, so for a French director to have a film distributed in the U.S. is a real opportunity.
Xavier DurringerMy film is actually very critical of the level of French we're using back home. To have an immigrant from an ancient French colony come and do that is a little critical of our education system back home. Balzac is definitely over their heads. It's meant to be funny also because it would be also probably too much for kids in France, but kids in France would know who Balzac is. But, back home at that age, I guarantee you they don't know who he is.
Philippe FalardeauI think that what people abroad want from French film, inside French film becomes our worst fear, "Oh, another film about love!"
Louis GarrelDespite history, despite English, despite the noteworthies, and a little bit also despite ourselves, alas!, the Quebecois people have stayed French. I had violently returned. This people had no need of directives to affirm its French pride in the face of the whole world
Pierre BourgaultMany Europeans think that all Moroccans speak French, but no. I had to make an effort to learn it when I studied French literature at the university in Rabat.
Abdellah TaiaI 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.
Scott SimonMy mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.
Jacques PepinIt may be a blessing in disguise...Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. Haitians were originally under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal. Ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other.
Pat RobertsonIt was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.
Kenneth Baker, Baron Baker of DorkingI never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.
Karl LagerfeldThe frontiers are not east or west, north or south; but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be a neighbor, there is anunsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.
Henry David Thoreau"The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool." Our quote of the day is, from of all people, the Marquis de Sade, the most infamous writer in all of French literature. And by the way, if you recognized that quote, you're sick.
Tucker CarlsonI am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.
Jean-Luc GodardPalestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.
Mahatma GandhiI have had some problems because the French don't like people to have success, they don't like the number one.
Alain ProstFrench is, in many ways, more difficult for an English-speaking person to sing. It is so full of complex and trying vowels. It requires the utmost subtlety.
Alma GluckI am a sur le motif painter, always in-the-field, with a French easel that folds up into a box, with backpack straps on it. Many of the sites I haunt are desolately beautiful. Few other people go there. I am gloriously alone, unmolested, and absorbed in attempting to see what I am looking at.
James Howard KunstlerThe 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.
Henry David ThoreauThe whole history between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is complicated. We share the island of Hispaniola, and Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic for twenty-two years after 1804 for fear that the French and Spanish would come back and reinstitute slavery. So we have this unique situation of being two independent nations on the same island, but with each community having its own grievance.
Edwidge DanticatMy father's Peruvian! I actually have a lot of family in Cuzco. I'm also Swiss, Alaskan, French, Spanish and Italian.
Q'orianka KilcherI wanted to write about what we were doing at the French Laundry, the recipes and the stories.
Thomas KellerBoys, welcome to the wonderful world of talking to women about their feelings. As a handy primer, here are a few things you should know: 1) Women have feelings. 2) You will spend the next seventy years or so trying to guess what they're feeling and why. 3) You will be wrong most of the time. 4) I like French Fries.
Brandon SandersonThe new French theme park based on Napoleon is named Napoleon's Bivouac, and will honor Napoleon with rides, battle reenactments, and the brutal March on Moscow ride. That's a walk-in freezer you stand in for 18 months while you try to eat a dead horse.
Peter SagalWhen I came to North America, it was hard. It was hard to understand, hard to get someone to understand me. I only knew Russian. I studied French in school, but it didn't help. I forgot most of that.
Pavel DatsyukI 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.
Nicolas SarkozyThis is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.
H. G. WellsSauces comprise the honor and glory of French cookery. They have contributed to its superiority, or pre-eminence, which is disputed by none. Sauces are the orchestration and accompaniment of a fine meal, and enable a good chef or cook to demonstrate his talent.
CurnonskyMost of the Ten Commandments are negative. The purpose of law is not to mandate good behavior. That concept comes from the French Revolution.
Randall TerryIt's not what you know about the computer that's important, but your ability to do things with it. By studying French in an academic setting, you get to know a lot about it, but typically, you can't express yourself well or have an interesting conversation with it.
Seymour PapertYou donโt want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I donโt want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.
Dorothy Parker