French Quotes

Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.

~ Steve Martin

The only French word I know is oui, which means “yes,” and only recently did I learn it’s spelled o-​u-​i and not w-​e-​e.

~ Stephanie Perkins

Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing--turn your toes out when you walk---And remember who you are!

~ Lewis Carroll

There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

...[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).

~ Karl Marx

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

~ Mark Twain

Etre dans le vent, c'est avoir le destin des feuilles mortes.

~ Jean Guitton

We are not our own light.

~ Nicolas Malebranche

L'utilité du vivre n'est pas en l'espace: elle est en l'usage.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage.

~ Michel De Montaigne

D'autant que nous avons cher, estre, et estre consiste en mouvement et action.

~ Michel De Montaigne

L'honneste est stable et permanent.

~ Michel De Montaigne

J'accuse toute violence en l'education d'une ame tendre, qu'on dresse pour l'honneur, et la liberté.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Je hay entre autres vices, cruellement la cruauté, et par nature et par jugement, comme l'extreme de tous les vices.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Il n'est rien qui tente mes larmes que les larmes.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Les naturels sanguinaires à l'endroit des bestes, tesmoignent une propension naturelle à la cruauté.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Nature a, (ce crains-je) elle mesme attaché à l'homme quelque instinct à l'inhumanité

~ Michel De Montaigne

Présente je vous fuis; absente, je vous trouve;Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit

~ Jean Racine

The scent of him was subtle, beautifully fresh, and she couldn’t think clearly. No man had ever brought out these intense feelings in her. Chris Augustine was dangerous and she could get lost in his arms.

~ Suzan Battah

Tous mes anciens amours vont me revenir.'- All my old loves will be returned to me

~ Carolyn Turgeon

Rien ne va arrêter ma quête pour te trouver No one will stop my quest to find you.

~ Susane Colasanti

Hope is a beautiful and magical thing. Grasp it tight, monsieur, and never let go.

~ Rachel L. Demeter

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Un soir qu'ils étaient couchés l'un près de l'autre, comme elle lui demandait d'inventer un poème qui commencerait par je connais un beau pays, il s'exécuta sur-le-champ. Je connais un beau pays Il est de l'or et d'églantine Tout le monde s'y sourit Ah quelle aventure fine Les tigres y sont poltrons Les agneaux ont fière mine À tous les vieux vagabonds Ariane donne des tartines. Alors, elle lui baisa le la main, et il eut honte de cette admiration.

~ Albert Cohen

When Hitler marched across the RhineTo take the land of France,La dame de fer decided,‘Let’s make the tyrant dance.’Let him take the land and city,The hills and every flower,One thing he will never have,The elegant Eiffel Tower.The French cut the cables,The elevators stood still,‘If he wants to reach the top,Let him walk it, if he will.’The invaders hung a swastikaThe largest ever seen.But a fresh breeze blewAnd away it flew,Never more to be seen.They hung up a second mark,Smaller than the first,But a patriot climbedWith a thought in mind:‘Never your duty shirk.’Up the iron ladyHe stealthily made his way,Hanging the bright tricolour,He heroically saved the day.Then, for some strange reason,A mystery to this day,Hitler never climbed the tower,On the ground he had to stay.At last he ordered she be razedDown to a twisted pile.A futile attack, for still she standsBeaming her metallic smile.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Haleine contre haleine, échauffe-moi la vie,Mille et mille baisers donne-moi je te prie,Amour veut tout sans nombre, amour n’a point de loiTranslated: Breath against breath warms my life.A thousand kisses give me I pray thee.Love says it all without number,love knows no law.

~ Pierre De Ronsard

Les rêves sont seuls les réalités de la vie.

~ Xavier Forneret

Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra.

~ Antonin Artaud

The French say you get hungry when you’re eating, and I get inspired when I’m working. It’s my engine

~ Karl Lagerfeld

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

~ Marcel Proust

I think Lafayette wants to rap in French now. I have to go learn some French.Damn it, Lafayette

~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

I think Lafayette wants to rap in French now. I have to go learn some French.Damn it, Lafayette.

~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent.

~ Marcel Proust

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

~ Stephen Fry

So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

You will do well to take advantage of Madame's short residence to get up your French a little... You will be glad of this, my dear, when you have reached France, where you will find they speak nothing else.

~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.

~ Michael Pollan

The past has given us much too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and the organization control; between the come one, come all of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is enough to leave this nightmare.

~ The Invisible Committee

You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?

~ Paul Bowles

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

~ Gustave Flaubert