Top 100 French English Quotes
#1. Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#2. I grew up in a literary home and majored in French, English, and sociology. They all have served me well over the years.
Gloria Gaither
#3. You don't lose much when the landlord's house burns down. Another landlord will always turn up, unless it's the same one, German or French, English or Chinese, to collect the rent ... In marks or francs? What difference does it make, seeing you've got to pay ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#4. My first restoration was on 'Napoleon,' trying to put the French version in with the English version, and it was most unsatisfactory.
Kevin Brownlow
#5. Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, and American culture.
John Robert Colombo
#6. I was raised to be kind. My parents were underdogs. Immigrant Jews. I spoke with an accent. I didn't speak English even - I spoke French and Yiddish mostly. I was picked on.
Saul Rubinek
#7. 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
#8. English is only a weak second language, so that the third language
which at the moment is getting the most play, since French is what I speak, read, and hear almost 24/7
is trying to take over the no. 2 spot.
Apol Lejano-Massebieau
#9. I prefer the finesse of French humour. English humour is more scathing, more cruel, as illustrated by Monty Python and Little Britain.
Helen Mirren
#11. From what I've read, everyone has a claim on Merlin. Was he Scottish, Welsh, English or even French? All these countries have got a big claim on him and Camelot. That's why the Arthurian legends are so popular - because they are such good stories.
Colin Morgan
#12. French: why does this language even exist? Everyone there speaks english anyway.
Meg Cabot
#13. The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.
Orson Scott Card
#14. If the French army was defeated, it was impossible to imagine that the English would survive.
Charles Kaiser
#15. I 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 Lagerfeld
#16. The smell of perfume left behind. There's not a word for that in English, but Colin knew the French word: sillage.
John Green
#17. Despite 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 Bourgault
#18. I tend to curse in French more often than I do in English.
Alaina Huffman
#19. There are many nations that have perfected a particular room. You know, you have the French drawing-room, the Austrian ball room, the German dining room, and I think the library is a room the English get right.
Julian Fellowes
#20. Some men prayed for life and some for death, in languages as varied as their uniforms - the Dutch and Germans and the Scots and French and English tangled side by side, for all men looked alike when they were dying.
Susanna Kearsley
#21. I'm quite discreet. I think I'd rather focus on my work. So, I only speak when I have something to say. 'Live hidden, and live happy.' Is that the same in English as it is in French?
Delphine Arnault
#22. In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.
Wim Wenders
#23. The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.
Margaret Atwood
#24. Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.
James Thurber
#25. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. I'm a little distracted by this English French American Boy Masterpiece.
Stephanie Perkins
#27. I never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words - like 'pois chiches' for chick peas!
Lydia Davis
#28. Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.
Maurice Druon
#29. Whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Sayonards, Lotharingians, Allemani, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Danes, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians.
Fulcher Of Chartres
#30. I don't really think of most non-English as people, more or less indigenous squirrels that I fancy to kick around with my snakeskin French Persian Boots
Thom Yorke
#31. I have an English identity and a French identity. When I'm in France, I'm more outgoing. And the French part of me cooks, whereas the English part of me writes.
Joanne Harris
#32. There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.
Tom Stoppard
#33. I've always felt very much from a mixed culture - mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, Thai, Mexican. Everything's had its influence on me.
J.M.G. Le Clezio
#34. Energy doesn't communicate in English, French, Chinese or Swahili, but it does speak clearly
Elaine Seiler
#35. Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of
the air!
Thomas Carlyle
#36. Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English.
Glen Duncan
#37. People have lots of misconceptions about me. My mum, who is half French and half Spanish, gets outraged when I'm called quintessentially English. I owe my looks to my mum-which was 90 percent of getting my first job. And, some people would argue, 90 percent of my entire career.
Helena Bonham Carter
#38. The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
#39. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#40. He was keen to use English as well as French in daily conversation, writing letters in English and commissioning translations of French and Latin books.
Ian Mortimer
#41. It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#42. Now, I know I'm going to break your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must call up all your fortitude, and try to bear it ... "Bob swore!" - as the Englishman said for "Good night", when he first learnt French, and thought it so like English. "Bob swore," my ducks!" (Chapter XXII)
Charles Dickens
#43. I would have thought you'd import an English staff?"
"Good heavens, no! I would not wish a British chef on anyone except the French tax collectors.
Dan Brown
#44. Although I feel very French, a part of my heart is in the States. When my brother and I arrived, we didn't really speak any English, and when we left, that's all we spoke when we played together. It was just a beautiful place to grow up.
Delphine Arnault
#45. Let us work toward greater cooperation with all Caribbean Countries, whether we speak English, Dutch, French or Spanish, whether we are independent or not, and whether we be island or continental territories.
Said Musa
#46. English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
David Crystal
#47. The best way to tell whether the Norwegian is a Norwegian is to say:
"Are you Swedish?"
Regardless whether you say this in English, French, Italian, Japanese, Urdu or Swahili, he will answer:
"Swedish? Me? I'm a Norwegian!"
Then you will be able to tell.
Odd Borretzen
#48. (The Francophile and radical John Stuart Mill had noted, not long after the Commune fell, in a letter to an English union leader, "an infirmity of the French mind" - that of "being led away by phrases, and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will and exert active power.")
Anonymous
#49. The recent riots in France demonstrate the problem European countries face where second and third generation immigrants still do not consider themselves French, German, or English.
Bobby Jindal
#50. The Divinity could be invoked as well in the English language as in the French.
Wilfrid Laurier
#51. Everyone tells me I have a funny accent. It's because I copy people. I learned English at school but have best friends who are French, Australian, English and American; a very weird mix.
Caroline Winberg
#52. The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.
Lauren Willig
#53. Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?
Goldwin Smith
#54. It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.
Geraldine Brooks
#55. They (Expos fans) discovered 'boo' is pronounced the same in French as it is in English.
Harry Caray
#56. 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.
Kenneth Baker
#57. In the Middle Ages, I think the French kings murdered slightly fewer of their family members than the English kings, though I haven't actually counted the heads.
Karen Maitland
#58. There's this thing, they have in french: L'espirit d'escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don't think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you're on the way out.
Neil Gaiman
#59. We English have no very strong attachment to the soil, we can make ourselves at home in any part of the world, but the French, I think, have an attachment to their country which is almost a physical bond. They're never really at ease when they're out of it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#60. For you, it's a silent movie. For us, it's a talking movie because we had lines on set. There's a lot of noise on set and music. We spoke in English, in French, in gibberish, but it was very alive. The challenge was tap dancing.
Jean Dujardin
#61. Because there'd be two languages I couldn't speak, French and English.
Casey Stengel
#62. I speak French, and I grew up with French, so my English is Franglais.
Corneille Ewango
#63. And it is not in any of our interests to have the balance of power turned on its head like this. An overly mighty French king is no improvement over an overly mighty English one.
Sharon Kay Penman
#64. Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#65. Notwithstanding the prevalent notion that the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of classic culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with the true classic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably Keats and Shelley.
William Shakespeare
#66. The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous - the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.
William Hazlitt
#67. The Russians were unparalleled in their suffering, the English in their reserve, the Americans in their love of life, the Italians in their love of Christ, and the French in their hope of love.
Paullina Simons
#68. Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.
Mahatma Gandhi
#69. Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no 'Nigerians' in the same sense as there are 'English,' 'Welsh,' or 'French.' The word 'Nigerian' is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria and those who do not.
Obafemi Awolowo
#70. French 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 Gluck
#71. I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions.
Kristin Scott Thomas
#72. 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.
Roy Blount Jr.
#73. I speak English, Portuguese, and French. One day I'd love to learn Italian.
Izabel Goulart
#75. The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.
Honore De Balzac
#76. French is the most beautiful," he said, "and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other.
Pearl S. Buck
#77. Some words, you know, it's amazing but some words would come only in French, and when I speak French, it would only come in English. And so the adjustment is very difficult sometimes.
Juliette Binoche
#78. A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.
Gertrude Stein
#79. What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
Victor Hugo
#80. I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.
Karl Lagerfeld
#81. It's difficult for me to write in English as it's not my first language, but French is even worse because of my father's influence and because the comparisons that I - not even other people - would make.
Charlotte Gainsbourg
#82. The English soldier was probably the worst-treated soldier in Europe, and judging from the English casualty rates during the Napoleonic wars, English generals were more lavish with their soldiers' lives than were their French and German colleagues.
J. Christopher Herold
#83. Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
Gilbert Highet
#84. The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.
Edmond De Goncourt
#85. We will not be demanding service in both French and English at the gas pumps where we fill our cars for twenty percent less than it costs us in Canada. We don't even want to make Americans aware that beer should not have the taste and alcohol content of bottled water.
Gordon Kirkland
#86. My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.
Lorraine Bracco
#87. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, my wife speaks five languages: Russian, English, French, Italian and, out of self-defense, Spanish. I watched her learn Spanish in three months.
Cheech Marin
#88. No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very 'aimable,' have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him.
Jane Austen
#89. What are you? German? American? English? Greek? Japanese? Turkish? French? Indian? Chinese? These are not real, these are virtual! You are human! This is what is real!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#90. You accept that you are English. You don't pretend that you'd rather be French or Italian or something else.
John Fowles
#91. A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.
Mark Twain
#92. 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.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#93. There is no word in English for chic. Why should there be? Everything chic is by legend French. Perhaps everything chic is in reality French.
Elizabeth Hawes
#94. Let us be French, let us be English, but most importantly let us be Canadian!
John A. Macdonald
#95. I suppose you heard him yelling as the doctor set his leg."
"I never knew there were so many rude words in the English language. Or French, German, Italian, Latin,or ... there was another language I didn't quite recognize."
"Greek.
Karen Hawkins
#96. boor (which originally just meant "farmer," as in the German Bauer and Dutch boer); villain (from the French vilein, a serf or villager); churlish (from English churl, a commoner); vulgar (common, as in the term vulgate); and ignoble, not an aristocrat.
Steven Pinker
#97. I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.
Hector Hugh Munro
#98. When I started writing, the first thing that came out was in English. I liked a few French things, but they were very overwhelming.
Thomas Mars
#99. Fair play is an English word. It is not a French word, and it has been copied all over the world. Unfortunately, it does not function any more here.
Arsene Wenger
#100. The English mind is intelligent rather than intellectual. The French are intellectual in the sense that the intellect is emancipated and left free to run its own course.
Ralph Barton Perry
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