French quotes

  • The Frenchwant to attack, the Americans want to bomb, and the British want to have another meeting.

    -Anonymous
      US diplomat commenting on the war in Bosnia. Quoted by William Safire in the NewYork Times, 27  Jul.

  • The French Revolution is merely the herald of a far greaterand much more solemn revolution, whichwill be the last† The hour has come for founding the Republic of equalsthat great refuge open to every man.

    - Fran c° ois Noe«  l Babeuf
    Conjuration des EŁ   gaux.

  • The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than theyare.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Essays, no.26,'Of Seeming Wise'.

  • Mayonnaise, n.One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

    - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
      The Cynic's Word Book. Retitled  The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

  • Our special task, as French Canadians, is to insert into America the spirit of Christian France.

    - Henri Bourassa
      La Langue, Gardienne de la Foi.

  • It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.

    -VanWyck Brooks
      From  A Writer's Notebook.

  • My scrofulous French novel On grey paper with blunt type!

    - Robert Browning
      Dramatic Lyrics,'Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister'.

  • Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thingturn out your toes as you walkand remember who you are!

    -Dodgson
      The Red Queen's advice to  Alice as she begins the chess game. Through the Looking-Glass, ch.2,'The Garden of Live Flowers'.

  • 'Do you know Languages? What's the French for fiddle- de-dee?' 'Fiddle-de-dee's not English,'Alice replied gravely. 'Who ever said it was?'said the Red Queen. Alice thought she saw a way out of the difficulty this time.'If you'll tell me what language'fiddle-de-dee' is, I'll tell you the French for it!'she exclaimed triumphantly. Butthe Red Queendrewherself up rather stiffly, and said 'Queens never make bargains.' 197

    -Dodgson
    Through the Looking-Glass, ch.9,'Queen  Alice'.

  • Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

    -Willa Sibert Cather
      Death Comes to the Archbishop, prologue.

  • To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horseGerman.

    -CharlesV
    Attributed.

  • Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely, And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.

    - Geoffrey Chaucer
      Canterbury  Tales,'General Prologue', l.122^6.

  • Imagine the Lord talking French! Aside from a few odd wordsin Hebrew,Itook it forgrantedthat God had never spoken anything but the most dignified English.

    - Clarence Shepard Day
      Life With Father,'Father interferes'.

  • The French will only be united under the threat of danger. How else can one govern a country that produces 246 different types of cheese?

    - Charles de Gaulle
      Speech. Quoted in Les Mots du Ge  ne  ral (1962).

  • Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.

    - (George) Norman Douglas
    Siren Land,'Rain on the Hills'.

  • Je suis autant Chinois que Fran c° ais. I am as much Chinese as French.

    - Gustave Flaubert
      Letter to Mme Louise Colet, 8  Aug.

  • Avery unique cat†a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant.

    - Allen Ginsberg
      Of  Jack Kerouac. This Fabulous Century1950^1960.

  • During my seven years in office,I was in love with seventeen million French women† I know this declaration will inspire irony and that English language readers will find it very French.

    -Vale  ry Giscard d'Estaing
      Le Pouvoir et la  vie.

  •   You get all the French-fries the President can't get to.

    - Al(bert,Jr) Gore
      On being Vice-President. In the NewYork Times, 8  Apr.

  • Weep not for little Le  onie Abducted by a French Marquis! Though loss of honour was a wrench Just think how it's improved her French.

    - Harry Graham
      More Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes,'Compensation'.

  • The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

    -Thomas Gray
      Letter to Richard West, 8  Apr. Collected in H  W Starr (ed) Correspondence of  Thomas Gray (1971).

  • The Frenchhad a moremartial air thanthe English.There seemed to be a species of military instinct in all classes. No young man appeared to have finished his education till after a bloody campaign† They were at this singular period, without the least exaggeration, a century behind us in notions of legal and moral responsibility.

    - Benjamin Robert Haydon
    Autobiography (published1847).

  • La langue fran c° aise n'est point fixe  e et ne se fixera point. French is not a static language and will never become static.

    -Victor Marie Hugo
      Cromwell, pre  face.

  • Greater lovethanthis,hesaid, nomanhaththat a manlay down his wife for his friend.Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail.

    -James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
      Ulysses.

  •    You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French comrades against the invasion of a common enemy† In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women.You must entirely resist both temptations, and while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.Do your duty bravely. Fear God. Honour the King.

    - 1st Earl Herbert
      Message to the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, reported in The Times,19  Aug.

  • New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one- trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle. St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

    - Norman Kingsley Mailer
      Miami and the Siege of Chicago,'The Siege of Chicago'.

  •    A spectre is haunting Europethe spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holyalliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore,1888).

  • Oh some are fond of Spanish wine, and some are fond of French, And some'll swallow tay and stuff fit only for a wench. 559

    -John Edward Masefield
      'Captain Stratton's Fancy'.

  • The French are nice people. I allow them to sing and to write, and they allow me to do whatever I like.

    -Jules, Cardinal Mazarin
    Attributed by the Duchess of Orle  ans in a letter dated 25 Oct 1715.

  • The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.

    - Robert Morley
      A Musing Morley,'France and the French'.

  • I started off in films as a kinga French king, admittedly, but nevertheless a king in MarieAntoinetteand stayed in that sort of income bracket.

    - Robert Morley
    Quoted in The Best of Robert Morley (1981).

  •   What are we learning Frenchor thepianofor,Iwould like to know, if it is not to be sold to a man some day† We have to cringe, and manoeuvre, and grimace for a husbanda husband who may be deaf orhavea hump if he is richa husband that may attack you in delirium tremens to-day if he makes a devout act of contrition for it to-morrow.

    -William O'Brien
      When We Were Boys.

  • Our fathers have, in process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.

    - SirArthurThomas known as  'Q' Quiller-Couch
      The Oxford Book of EnglishVerse, preface.

  • The things people had once held against her† unconventional beauty†un-American elegance, the taste for French clothes and French foodwere suddenly no longer liabilities but assets.

    - Arthur M(eier),Jr Schlesinger
      OnJacqueline Kennedy's post-election image. AThousand Days.

  • As the French say, there are three sexesmen, women, and clergymen.

    - Rev Sydney Smith
    Quoted in Lady Holland Memoir (1855), vol.1, ch.9.

  • Now hang it! quoth I, as I look'd towards the French coasta man should know something of his own country too, before he goes abroad.

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Tristram.Tristram Shandy, bk.7, ch.2.

  • The French are polite, but it is often mere ceremonious politeness. A Russian imbues his polite things with a heartiness that compels belief in their sincerity.

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
      The Innocents Abroad.

  • We are all American at puberty; we die French.

    - Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
      Diary note,18 Jul.

  • An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English speaking audiences.

    - Edith Newbold ne  e Jones Wharton
      TheAge of Innocence, bk.1, ch.1.

  • Into the face of the young man†had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

    -Plum
      The Luck of the Bodkins, ch.1.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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