Top 64 Quotes About Being French
#2. Being French, to me, is first and foremost being a revolutionary.
Eric Cantona
#4. I just dreamed about living in Paris and being French. I always loved the visual arts, film and theatre, and I hoped to be involved in creating beautiful products and images.
Maureen Chiquet
#5. 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
#7. I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French.
Charles De Gaulle
#8. I've always loved writing, and my heritage has been interesting, growing up in a bi-cultural family. My mother being Vietnamese and my father being French, it's like an East-West meeting in my house.
Mylene Dinh-Robic
#9. It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.
Tana French
#10. of experience at the Privy Council Office who was hired to be an editor of the French translation but ended up being a primary editor of the entire report. I headed
Kevin Page
#11. I'd had a French education for three years, my father being in the army. From 9 to 12, I went to French school. I've been sort of part of the culture, part of the geography, since I was quite young - the imprint was there.
Charlotte Rampling
#12. The prospect of one day being hauled out of the canal by yet another old enemy was hard for France to swallow, even more so when British and French defence specialists discussed their exit strategy in case of an overwhelming Soviet attack, and the Brits proposed a massive evacuation via Dunkirk.
Stephen Clarke
#13. After the French Revolution, it was not the treason of the king that was in question; it was the existence of the king. You have to be very careful when you judge and execute somebody for being a symbol.
Adam Michnik
#14. As if being a former vampire drone in a werewolf household were not shocking enough, the maid then opened her mouth and proved that she was also, quite reprehensibly, French.
Gail Carriger
#15. Louise de Keroualle, being a Frenchwoman from the French court, was feared by most Englishmen for how she might influence their king, and that fear quickly turned to hatred.
Susan Holloway Scott
#16. I don't think it's a low point being in the finals of the French Open, three points away from the victory.
Martina Hingis
#17. The French people recognizes the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. The first day of every month is to be dedicated to the eternal.
Louis Antoine De Saint-Just
#19. We heard that girls who had left to get married were being deported with their husbands. A girl who had a love affair with a French prisoner was sent to a concentration camp, and the Frenchman was executed.
Edith Hahn Beer
#20. I am no one's agent. I am the agent of the law. All the conspiracies pass through my hands. The Committee, you know, draws its present unity from being conspired against. I do not know what would happen if the policy of believing in conspiracies were changed.
Hilary Mantel
#21. The French have the reputation of being arrogant. I don't think it's arrogance but a certain authenticity.
Simon Baker
#22. The most terrible of all my battles was the one before Moscow. The French showed themselves to be worthy of victory, but the Russians showed themselves worthy of being invincible.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#23. My food is Louisiana, New Orleans-based, well-seasoned, rustic. I think it's pretty unique because of my background being influenced by my mom, Portuguese and French Canadian. There's a lot going on there.
Emeril Lagasse
#24. I went through very emotional things this year, like being in the French Open finals already feeling like you got it and kind of losing it.
Martina Hingis
#25. A kid just couldn't see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something, or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.
Tim Powers
#26. The French are very bizarre. There is this collective depiction: 'We're in decline, we're being assailed, we must protect ourselves.'
Alain Juppe
#27. ... why do men continue to practice in themselves, the absurdities they despise in others?
Thomas Paine, The rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke's attack on the French Revolution (2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1791), p. 41.
Thomas Paine
#28. To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
Leslie Fiedler
#29. I love languages (I speak French and Spanish and have been studying Russian) and accents; so one definite dream role would be being able to combine those elements into a character.
Sundra Oakley
#30. I don't know French at all. I took some lessons when I was younger but all I know are the numbers. I've been told basically everyone in Monaco speaks English because of it being a huge vacation spot so I'm excited about that. I might not need to learn French after all.
Freddy Adu
#31. The relentless pursuit of being different is very French.
Alain Ducasse
#32. Somebody was telling me about the French Army rifle that was being advertised on eBay the other day - the description was, 'Never shot. Dropped once.
Roy Blunt
#33. Dariya and I used to play French Revolution when we were little. We'd take turns being Marie Antoinette. Our grandmamma caught us once and had us whipped for revolutionary sentiments. We were six years old at the time and had no idea even what revolutionary sentiments were.
Robin Bridges
#34. Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#35. Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.
Will Durant
#36. The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.
Charlotte Gainsbourg
#37. My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa?
Augusten Burroughs
#38. The beauty of being a woman, as the French say, "of a certain age", is that I can be invisible. Young people, both men and women, look right through me, unless I make the effort to be noticed.
Nanci Rathbun
#39. I love shooting French films because I don't have to stick with being sophisticated or stuck-up.
Kristin Scott Thomas
#40. The three actors I admire the most are all dead. Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy and the French actor, Jean Gabin. They're all very natural, sort of masculine without being overly macho.
Michael Caine
#41. Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.
Bill Bryson
#42. As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted sixty years ago, as soon as we imagine we're being watched, we start to notice how we're behaving, and we begin to imagine how other people might respond if they were watching.
Adam Alter
#43. 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
#44. The French and the British are such good enemies that they can't resist being friends.
Peter Ustinov
#45. (Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)
Tom Robbins
#46. Quebec City is the most European of any city in North America; they speak French all the time. There is a part of town called Old Quebec which is really like being in France. The architecture is just gorgeous, food, shopping. I'd say Quebec City is the most beautiful city in North America I've seen.
Sebastian Bach
#47. Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods.
Michael Winter
#48. [The] taste [of the French] is too timid to be true taste
or is but half taste.
Horace Walpole
#49. I found the guy! After more than twenty years of being single and jerked around and cheated on and alone, I found my soul mate. Pardon my French, but you think I give a shit about the flowers?
Lauren Weisberger
#50. The English are very fond of being entertained, and ... they regard the French and the American people as destined by Heaven to amuse them.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#51. The greatest difficulty we have faced is the neocolonial way of thinking that exists in this country. We were colonized by a country, France, that left us with certain habits. For us, being successful in life, being happy, meant trying to live as they do in France, like the richest of the French.
Thomas Sankara
#52. Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know
Simone De Beauvoir
#53. The revolutionaries failed to institute the novel forms of social and political organization they hankered after; Workers would not accept a ten-day week, or state-appointed priests, or rectangular departements, or the cult of the Supreme Being.
Alan Ryan
#54. Talk English to me, Tommy.
Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole.
But the meanings are different
in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#55. Eight hundred small boats had loaded 338,000 men into larger ships during the legendary evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, including 500 French officers and 18,000 French sailors, to prevent them from being captured or killed by the Germans.
Charles Kaiser
#56. I know never to take a wine for granted. Drawing a cork is like attendance at a concert or at a play that one knows well, when there is all the uncertainty of no two performances ever being quite the same. That is why the French say, 'There are no good wines, only good bottles.'
Gerald Asher
#57. Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#58. I can't think of this country without Quebec. Je parle francais. And when I think about being a Canadian, speaking French is part of it.
Michael Ignatieff
#59. Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.
Mark Twain
#60. Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.
Joseph Boyden
#61. The strongest army in the world [the French] facing no more than twenty-six [German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!
J. F. C. Fuller
#62. (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
#63. The man's tongue is fit to frighten the French. Another fever."
Ah, there," said Morgan, "that comed of sp'iling Bibles."
That comed
as you call it
of being arrant asses.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#64. Madame Tallien shared honors with Josephine Beauharnais in being mistress to Barras, an ex-nobleman and ex-terrorist whose appetite for beautiful women, beautiful young men, and money was the only wholesome trait in his character.
J. Christopher Herold
