Top 67 French Word Quotes
#1. There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.
Christopher Hitchens
#2. The French word for wanderlust or wandering is 'errance.' The etymology is the same as 'error.' So to wander is to make mistakes. In other words, to make mistakes, to make errors is sort of the idea of learning through trial and error, allowing the mistakes to be part of the process.
Robyn Davidson
#3. 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
#4. I think everyone is aware how disgusting snails are, and that's why they are served in a bowl of wine and butter and called "escargots," which is a French word loosely translated as "denial.
Jim Gaffigan
#5. Approfondement is a French word that means 'playing easily in the deep.'
Tom Robbins
#6. Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.
Julian Barnes
#7. I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.
Golda Meir
#8. I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.
Lawrence Block
#9. The word courage comes from the French word coeur, which means "heart." When you go ahead and do something despite the fear you feel, courage arises from within your heart.
Rhonda Byrne
#10. What is the French word for rain? Le rain? La rain? Is the rain masculine or feminine? It's such a bother that it must be masculine.
Libba Bray
#11. Remember, our kind protects you Normals from the Pures. We are the rope tied between man and super-beast. A rope forever dangling from the precipice.
I tap Zetania's shoulder and ask, "What's a precipice?"
"A cliff's edge," she whispers.
Precipice. Must be a French word.
Daven Anderson
#12. The smell of perfume left behind. There's not a word for that in English, but Colin knew the French word: sillage.
John Green
#13. The word "preacher" comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?
Marilynne Robinson
#14. Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.
Steve Martin
#15. Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
Alan Perlis
#16. George W. Bush, the former US president, is reputed to have complained that the problem with the French is that they do not have a word for entrepreneurship in their language.
Ha-Joon Chang
#17. The word he used was coup, and I'm not speaking French just to arouse you.
Jim Lynch
#19. NOMISMA, MEANING 'COIN', was used by both Greeks and Romans. Our own word 'money' derives, via the French monnaie, from the Latin moneta, meaning the mint, where coins are struck. (In early Rome the mint was situated on the Capitoline Hill in the temple of Juno Moneta.)
Norman Davies
#20. The word Chivalry is derived from the French cheval, a horse.
Thomas Bulfinch
#21. The thing that's wrong with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur
George W. Bush
#22. Use the word 'ya'll' and before you knew it, you'd find yourself in a haystack french-kissing an underage goat
David Sedaris
#23. 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
#24. The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.
George H. W. Bush
#25. Cantona's expression speaking the whole French dictionary without saying a word.
Barry Davies
#26. The word "journal" has in its root the word jour, French for day. A journey was the distance that could be traveled in a day. A journal, therefore, consisted of the writing one recorded per day.
Sheila Bender
#27. It occurs to Blanche that English doesn't have French's useful distinction between libre, meaning that something's unconstrained, and gratuit, meaning that it costs nothing. Free thought, free speech, free love: the English word that Arthur was so fond of obscures the price of things.
Emma Donoghue
#28. (optimisme itself was a word that first entered the French language in the eighteenth century).
Kenan Malik
#29. 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
#30. Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory ...
John Muir
#31. My parents were lenient. My mother believed God was another word for nature. I took up Satanism not out of desperation, but out of logic. I rebelled, not but because of a religious or repressive childhood. I wanted to join the French Foreign Legion.
Anton Szandor LaVey
#32. In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.
Rory Stewart
#33. The word "buccaneer" originated in a native people's term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn't board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.
Tom Reiss
#34. When a baby first looks at you ... when it laughs that deep, unselfconscious gurgle; or when it cries and you pick it up and it clings sobbing to you ... then you are-happy is not the precise word-filled.
Marilyn French
#35. Sam's a - pardon my French - chicken-shit-paper-thin liar whose word is as good as a slaughterhouse bird promising golden eggs." If
Anne McAneny
#36. 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
#37. I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.
Jessye Norman
#38. It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.
Julian Barnes
#39. I have always been uncomfortable with a series of movies. I hate that word 'franchise' - it always makes me think of French fries. What I felt each time was that we were going for broke, that this was going to be the last in the series. You can't count on anything.
Sigourney Weaver
#40. I always thought there was something French about her, ever since the word 'insouciance' flitted across the surface of my mind the first time we met.
Jessica Pine
#41. The word mortgage originates in French. it literally means 'death grip'.
Michael McGirr
#42. Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff didn't like the word 'horror'. They, like I, went for the French description: 'the theatre of the fantastique'.
Christopher Lee
#43. Because he's just so, so," Peter paused looking for the right word, "so French!
Jack Lewis Baillot
#44. At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
Emil Cioran
#45. With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.
Lytton Strachey
#46. I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word 'home' has only one meaning: Iran. I suppose it's that way for everyone: Home is the place where one is born and raised.
Marjane Satrapi
#47. The word liberal has been employed as the political equivalent of an untreatable but potentially containable social disease
the kind that could be contracted merely by going to a foreign movie or ordering a decaf latte, or worse, a glass of French wine.
Eric Alterman
#48. I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.
Deborah Levy
#49. In the beginning was the Mother, the Word began a new era, one we have come to call Patriarchy.
Marilyn French
#50. The French have the perfect word for it: 'flaneur'. It means to stroll around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flaneur as 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'.
Gemma Burgess
#51. 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
#52. The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.
Jacques Barzun
#53. ...unfortunately, I am incapable of thinking up perfectly biting, split-second retorts, in any language. The French even have a word for this: l'esprit de l'escalier; staircase wit, something you only think of on the way out.
Tania Aebi
#54. There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.
Nicholson Baker
#55. The image foreigners have of French cuisine is fattening and very fancy food. But it's not true - French food isn't just rich. The word "healthy" doesn't exist in French. We have many, many words, but not that one. To me, healthy means paying close attention to feeding people.
Alain Ducasse
#56. I meant every word of it, Dylan Day. Lie to me and I'll cut your cock off and pickle it.
Kitty French
#57. But, reader, there is no comfort in the word "farewell," even if you say it in French. "Farewell" is a word that,in any language, is full of sorrow. It is a word that promises absolutely nothing.
Kate DiCamillo
#58. We found many difficulties to combat, for it is not an easy thing to go into France and learn to talk French well; but at the same time, if a man sets to work in good earnest, he can do it. I have scratched the word "can't" out of my vocabulary long since, and I have not got it in my French one.
John Taylor
#59. Can I give you a word of advice?" Lucy asked.
"I suppose so."
"You have a great French accent. If a guy asks you to wear a French maid's costume, kick him in the shin."
"Especially if it's one of my brothers" Solange agreed.
Alyxandra Harvey
#60. The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but "accessory" in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.
Robert Graves
#61. Trinidad's language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it's the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.
Monique Roffey
#62. 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
#63. He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.
Colin Cotterill
#64. Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word 'impossible' is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.
Jules Verne
#65. When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
#66. It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#67. Even after all these years, she still said the word "gig" self-consciously, in the same way that she always said "croissant" with the proper French pronunciation, but with an apologetic, self-deprecating look to make up for her pretentiousness.
Liane Moriarty
