Frenchman Quotes
More Frenchman Quotes
The Frenchman, easy, debonair, and brisk, Give him his lass, his fiddle, and his frisk, Is always happy, reign whoever may, And laughs the sense of mis'ry far away.
william cowper— William Cowper, Table Talk, line 237.
It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language. A Frenchman in America is not expected to talk like an American, but an Englishman speaking his mother tongue is thought to be affected and giving himself airs. Or else he is taken for a German or a Dutchman, and is complemented on his grammatical mastery of the language of another nation.
— Bertrand Russell, "Can Americans and Britons Be Friends?", Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1944
To be an American is an ideal, whileto be a Frenchman is a fact.
— 1987 In Time, 9 Nov.
Every day I think about where I come from and I am still proud to be who I am: first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman.
Zinedine Zidane— 2004 Explaining his identityhis father was a Berber from the Kabylie region of Algeria and Zidane grew up in the Marseille suburb of La Castellane. In the Observer, 4 Apr.
I praise the Frenchman [Voltaire], his remark was shrewd —How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude!But grant me still a friend in my retreatWhom I may whisper — solitude is sweet.
william cowper— Line 739.
Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true,—A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew.
william cowper— Truth, line 327.
There are three things, young gentlemen, which you are constantly to bear in mind. Firstly, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman, as you do the devil.
horatio nelson— Nelson's advice to his Midshipmen (1793). Pettigrew, Thomas Jos. Memoirs of the Life of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson K.B., Volume 2. London: T. and W. Boone, New Bond Street. 1849, pg 580.
Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.
william makepeace thackeray— Vol. I, ch. 13.
A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it.
Art Buchwald— New York Herald Tribune (16 January 1958)
A Frenchman must be always talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content to say nothing, when he has nothing to say.
samuel johnson— 1780, p. 446.
Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?
karl marx— (BASTIAT AND CAREY), p. 809-810
Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition and perchance to some excess I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.
Michel de Montaigne— Book III, ch. 9
The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived – not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve.
charles augustin sainte-beuve— Lafcadio Hearn Life and Literature (1917; Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger, 2005) p. 82
I praise the Frenchman; his remark was shrewd, "How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude." But grant me still a friend in my retreat, Whom I may whisper Solitude is sweet.
william cowper— William Cowper, Retirement, line 739. The quotation is attributed to La Bruyère and to Jean Guez de Balzac.
The fame of the brave outlives him; his portion is immortality. What more flattering homage could we pay to the manes of Paul Jones, than to swear on his tomb to live or to die free? It is the vow, it is the watch-word of every Frenchman.
— Paul Henri Marron, officiating Protestant clergyman, discourse at the funeral of John Paul Jones, Paris, France (July 20, 1792); reported in Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (1830), p. 68.
An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Russian were arguing about the nationality of Adam and Eve. “They must have been English”, declares the Englishman. "Only a gentleman would share his last apple with a woman.” ”They were undoubtedly French", says, the Frenchman. “Who else could seduce a woman so easily?” "I think they were Russians", says the Russian. "After all, who else could walk stark-naked, feed on one apple between the two of them and think they are in Paradise?"
Judson K. Cornelius— Church Humour (2002, p. 12)
In old times, you see, a man who wanted to educate himself a Frenchman, for instance would have set to work to study all the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way. But in our day he goes straight for the literature of negation, very quickly assimilates all the extracts of the science of negation, and he's ready.
— Leo Tolstoy, Professor Golenishtchev in Anna Karenina, C. Garnett, trans. (New York: 2003), Part 5, Chapter 9, p. 434
