Top 100 Quotes About The French Language
#1. Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.
Robert Fitzgerald
#2. We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.
David Amram
#3. Proximity to this death makes me nostalgic for the French language.
Henri Cole
#4. You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.
Bernard Pivot
#5. I just love France, I love French people, I love the French language, I love French food. I love their mentality. I just feel like it's me. I'm very French.
Olga Kurylenko
#6. To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
Florence King
#7. I love the French language ... it's a delightful language, especially to curse with. It's like whopping your ass with silk.
Oscar Wilde
#8. The Canadian community must invest, for the defence and better
appreciation of the French language, as much time, energy, and money as
are required to prevent the country from breaking up
Pierre Trudeau
#9. I am attached to the French language. I will defend the ubiquitous use of French.
Francois Hollande
#10. Socialist ideology is making France go to pot, and the French language with it.
Maurice Druon
#11. A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#12. I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#13. In the past the French came to Germany less with the desire to understand it than with a zealous desire to interpret, to analyze it dispassionately something for which their training at the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the French language superbly equipped them to do.
Walter Abish
#14. As for the French language, it's probably one of the most beautiful in the world. I speak a little bit and I can follow conversations, but I think it will take time to improve myself.
Charlene, Princess Of Monaco
#15. I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology.
Mary Kubica
#16. One thing I can say about the French language is that no one in the world loves their language as much as they do. It doesn't matter if you're close - it still sounds terrible to their ears.
Mads Mikkelsen
#17. (optimisme itself was a word that first entered the French language in the eighteenth century).
Kenan Malik
#18. The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.
Lytton Strachey
#19. In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
Victor Hugo
#20. I don't know what it is about the french language, it seems to be scared of coming out of the mouth so it comes out the nose instead.
P.D.Q. Bach
#21. To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.
Rex Stout
#22. What makes international cinema so interesting is that each territory has its own sensibility. When you look at an Indian or French film, there's a certain flavor. And even though the language is different, if the film is successful, it has something very common and understandable.
Wong Kar-Wai
#23. I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
Christopher Hitchens
#24. 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
#25. as the descendants of the Normans finally amalgamated with the English natives, the Anglo-Saxon language reasserted itself; but in its poverty it had to borrow hundreds of French words (literary, intellectual, and cultural) before it could become the language of literature.
Richard A. LaFleur
#26. The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
Adam Gopnik
#27. What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.
Branford Marsalis
#28. Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.
Michael Dirda
#29. People say 'Why would you learn Dutch? Nobody speaks it. Why not French?' Even the Dutch say that to me! I say because I want to live here, I think it's only common courtesy that I speak the language.
Anthony Geary
#30. English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.
Yael Naim
#31. All gentlemen of any rank with whom he holds conversations can speak Latin, French, Spanish or Italian. They are aware that the English language is only used in this island and would consider themselves uncivilized if they knew no other tongue than their own.
Ian Mortimer
#32. Maybe that was why the French called orgasms "las petites morts": because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug.
Nenia Campbell
#33. For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
Paul Engle
#34. In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here.
Simon McBurney
#35. I have been challenged with the fictional languages I have to learn. I wasn't terrible at languages at school - I got an A in French, so I did well enough - but I didn't enjoy them. I'm not even sure if that plays into how well you learn a fictional language!
Nathalie Emmanuel
#36. ...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
#37. It's just incredible. When you're French, coming from a non-English language country, you don't even dream about Oscar recognition or nominations. It's just beyond the dream. It's something very, very special and unique. It's the highest recognition any filmmaker could dream of.
Michel Hazanavicius
#38. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.
Minae Mizumura
#39. When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
#40. 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
#41. The more English is heard in the world, the more gratifying it seems to speak French, and above all to know the culture of our country. They find a kind of French social grace in the language and culture.
Bernard Pivot
#42. Do you know why the French are so honest? because there are so few words in their language they're forced to be.
William Gaddis
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.
Marilyn French
#46. The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#47. We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.
The Invisible Committee
#48. The people of the two nations [French and English] must be brought into mutual dependence by the supply of each other's wants. There is no other way of counteracting the antagonism of language and race. It is God's own method of producing an entente cordiale, and no other plan is worth a farthing.
Richard Cobden
#49. The main thing is, the constraints have come off style. What we are saying now is that the Revolution does not proceed in a pitiless, forward direction, its politics and its language becoming ever more gross and simplistic: the Revolution is always flexible, subtle, elegant.
Hilary Mantel
#50. English, once accepted as an international language, is no more secure than French has proved to be as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy or as Latin has proved to be as the international language of science.
Edward Sapir
#51. I didn't look in Marie's direction. I didn't have time to, because the presiding judge told me in bizarre language that I was to have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people...
Albert Camus
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. French, for example, is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort.
David Graddol
#55. People who share the same language, French or Chinese or whatever, have the same vocal cords and emit sounds which are basically the same, as they come from the same throats and lungs.
Pierre Schaeffer
#56. I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It's such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.
Belva Plain
#58. So I'm all, "Owned! Bee-yatch! Dog fucking owned you!" Doing a minor booty dance of ownage, perhaps, in retrospect, a bit prematurely. (I believe hip-hop to be the apprpriate language for taunting, at least until I learn French.)
Christopher Moore
#59. 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
#60. I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.
Anthony Bourdain
#61. What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.
David Sedaris
#62. I write. I have read a great deal. I enjoy books. I like the wit of languages. Even French I like. I like to be able to think in different modes. I like to be able to use the language a great deal and carry on rehearsals in French.
Twyla Tharp
#63. It was an identity crisis. I was born and raised in France, but I never really felt French, so I needed to find something that I was more connected to. I used to go back to Tunisia every summer, but I was more into the language, my Arabic roots.
EL Seed
#64. The Divinity could be invoked as well in the English language as in the French.
Wilfrid Laurier
#65. UGH. Boys. They're like French class
no matter how much I study, I'll never be fluent in the language.
Jen Calonita
#66. French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.
Ernest Hemingway,
#67. 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
#68. 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 Wharton
#69. Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit.
Edward Sapir
#70. I think it's important to be sincere. And I could be the most sincere just staying in [my] mother language actually. And that's the reason why I stay composing and writing in French.
Stromae
#71. My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.
Anthony Bourdain
#72. You may hold as many (literature) degrees as your hands (and pockets) may take, but if you have NOT read the book 'Le Grand Voyage' by Jorge Semprun, preferably in French (Yes we can! and I can't speak that language) then you ain't seen nothing yet...
Itzik Sivosh
#73. Originality is a quality that cannot be imitated. The technique of the language, on the other hand, is something that belongs to all who can understand it.
John French Sloan
#74. People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.
John McWhorter
#75. The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France.
William Gaddis
#76. French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.
Patricia Hampl
#77. 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
#78. When a Quebecker is interviewed for French TV, he or she is often subtitled in 'normal' French, as if the language they speak in francophone Canada is so barbarous that Parisians won't be able to understand
Stephen Clarke
#79. I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.
Patrick Modiano
#80. If we have to prove our Europeanism by accepting that French is the dominant language in the Community, then my answer is quite clear, and I will say it in French in order to prevent any misunderstanding: Non, merci beaucoup .
James Callaghan
#81. Even if I'm in Japan and I don't speak Japanese and the woman facing me doesn't speak French but she's dressed in Rykiel, and she recognizes me, then we have a common language right away.
Sonia Rykiel
#82. Honestly, I'm cool with everyone, and people pick up on that. I'd say, 'I'm not gay, but it's all good.' It's kind of like going to Paris when you don't know the language; some Americans get into trouble over there, but I'm just like, 'Sorry, I don't speak French.'
Dylan McDermott
#83. 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.
#84. The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance.
A.A. Gill
#85. Irene gasped. "Have you taken leave of your senses, Stuart?" she hissed. "Have you?"
Stuart closed his eyes.
"No," he said. "Au contraire." It was strong language for the Edinburgh New Town, but he had to say it.
"Don't au contraire me," said Irene.
But it was too late. He had.
Alexander McCall Smith
#86. [deconstruction and other French theories] was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.
Jean Baudrillard
#87. To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all - French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal.
Michael Dirda
#88. Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.
Joseph Bottum
#89. Zis and zat' when uttered by the French is considered charming, but 'dis and dat' as an Africanism is ridiculed as gross and ugly.
Alice Childress
#90. The French verb aimer has two meanings. And that's why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.
John Green
#91. It always felt good to have that moment of resolve, like saying, "I'm gonna learn French!" It doesn't matter if you do it or not, deciding is the high, right?
Felicia Day
#92. My film is in French. It's not something folkloric. It's who we are. There's this tension about immigrants coming in. Will they learn French? Will they adapt? In this film, I'm on the reverse side because Monsieur Lazhar comes from a society where French is also the second language.
Philippe Falardeau
#93. 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
#94. If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power.
Lionel Jospin
#95. I had severed relations with the Romanian exiles who had become politically conservative and even extremely right wing; I was giving chess lessons to earn a living. Luckily we spoke quite a bit of French at home so it wasn't too difficult for me to write in my adopted language.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#96. I like how writing can take you off for a jaunt in your head and then set you back down in the chair where you've been all along.
Georgann Low
#98. But it is infamous that they have not told you!' declared Eustacie. 'Je n'en reviendrai jamais!'
'If it's all the same to you, miss, I'd just as soon you'd talk in a Christian language,' said Mr. Stubbs.
Georgette Heyer
#99. The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language.
P. J. O'Rourke
#100. When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved.
Lytton Strachey
