In France, I learned about wine and cheese. — Walter Wager
One thing I can say about the French language is that no one in the world loves their language as much as they do. — Mads Mikkelsen
French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic. — Bernard Pivot
to "set the standard for beauty in classical and modem cookery, and attest to the distant future that the French chefs of the 19th century were the most famous in the world. — Marie-Antoine Careme
Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved — Andre Malraux
There's always something fishy about the French. — Noel Coward
In # France we have a saying, 'Joie de Vivre,' which actually doesn't exist in the English language. It means looking at your life as something that is to be taken with great pleasure and enjoy it. — Mireille Guiliano
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future. — Albert Camus
Never doubt the courage of the French. They were the ones who discovered that snails are edible. — Doug Larson
The vitality of a culture is in its capacity to assimilate foreign influences. The culture that's defensive and closed condemns itself to decadence. — Juan Goytisolo
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
Only in Paris do couture workers, from seamstress to mannequin, worship a dress and treat it like a baby. — Pierre Balmain
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny. — Albert Camus
French people are Italian people in a bad mood. — Jean Cocteau
Let us be French, let us be English, but most importantly let us be Canadian! — John A. Macdonald
Short French Culture Quotes
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude. — Douglas Coupland
Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion. — Ambrose Bierce
In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment. — Shirin Neshat
National liberation is necessarily an act of culture — Amilcar Cabral
Paris dictates fashion to the whole world. — Maria Callas
Your culture sets your expectation for what is 'normal.' — James Clear
Courtly manners are contagious; they are caught at Versailles. — Jean De La Bruyere
Cultures are born and die, but the cheese is immortal. — Icelandic Proverbs
To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. — Frantz Fanon
French Culture Image Quotes
You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
French Fashion Quotes
Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants. — Karl Lagerfeld
Men always remember a woman who caused them concern and uneasiness. — Coco Chanel
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.
Unshined shoes are the end of civilization. — Diana Vreeland
The companies only developed if the state did not intervene in the French fashion. If on the contrary a certain degree of economic freedom was the rule, capitalism moved in firmly and adapted itself to all administrative quirks and difficulties — Fernand Braudel
Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your
languid spleen,
An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a
not-too-French French bean! — W. S. Gilbert
I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.
If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
There's a fashion, or maybe you could call it a necessity, in French cinema to make social films, which is to say films in which the characters are defined by their social context. — Louis Garrel
there are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion. — Gertrude Stein
My deep relations with fashion started in Paris in 1980s, when I was appointed head of The Fashion History course at French Esmod fashion school, the biggest and the best in those years in Paris. — Alexander Vassiliev
French Cinema Quotes
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. — Jean-Luc Godard
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
I think that nudity is beautiful. Sometimes it can be awful, but when it's beautiful? Cinema is the art about reality; it's art from reality. In French we say l'art de la realite. You show reality, so you have to show bodies. — Lea Seydoux
Your culture is your brand
Of course the French are making very credible movies and it is still one of the greatest nations in terms of world cinema but the real problem is the decay in film criticism. — Wim Wenders
It's the golden age of French cinema again but it's because Sarkozy had the guts to push through copyright law. — Harvey Weinstein
I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period. — Jean-Luc Godard
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it. — Bernardo Bertolucci
Americans have a certain idea of what films are and the French have a much deeper sense of cinema. The cinémathèque is like a temple for them. And the people who write about it are really intellectuals. It's just a sensibility that they appreciate it. — Jerry Schatzberg
All my life, I have loved and been inspired by French cinema, and as a studio head it has been my pride and joy to have the ability to bring movies to audiences around the world. — Harvey Weinstein
Every year there's a jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Getting on the jury is very competitive in France. Not because the French love cinema, but because they love to judge. — Craig Ferguson
French Movies Quotes
My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish. — Fran Lebowitz
When I make an American movie it's going to come out all over the world-it doesn't happen the same way for an Italian film or a French film. — Monica Bellucci
When Americans shoot movies they aim at the entire planet. When the French make movies, they aim at Paris. — Jean-Jacques Annaud
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
I like to watch French movies with the volume up so my neighbors could think I'm terrorist. — Felipe Esparza
I've wanted to make a film about French youth since I went to Cannes with my first film 'Kids' in 1995 ... Scribe's screenplay is about French kids today, and the world today. Just like my films 'Kids' and 'Ken Park', this will be a movie like you have never seen before. — Larry Clark
My favourite film is 'Le Diner de Cons,' a French movie. — Stan Wawrinka
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
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
The world distribution of French movies is a laughing matter. That is a fact. — Jean-Jacques Annaud
Movies in this country, its very complicated, and we could bang on about it forever, but the French movie industry is very different because its very obviously French. — Mick Jagger
I love French style from the Thirties and Forties. French movie stars like Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had so much natural, effortless style. — Vincent Cassel
French Literature Quotes
It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand. — Fredrik Bajer
What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature. — W. Somerset Maugham
I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual. — Baldur von Schirach
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert? — Manuel Puig
How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question. — Lytton Strachey
The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own. — Lytton Strachey
In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature. — Patrick White
Twitter reminds me of an era in French literature - Emile Zola and Honoré de Balzac - and the beginning of modernity and gossip. They had these fashion magazines of the time on display with all of the Emile Zola references. — Kim Gordon
Many Europeans think that all Moroccans speak French, but no. I had to make an effort to learn it when I studied French literature at the university in Rabat. — Abdellah Taia
There is an interview given by [ Jean-Paul] Sartre in the USA where he is asked what the future of French literature is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future is [Albert] Camus. — Catherine Camus
French Quotes
The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be. French translation — Marcel Pagnol
Original, in French: La bonne cuisine est la base du véritable bonheur.
English: Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness. — Auguste Escoffier
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. — Mother Teresa
My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal. — Julius Evola
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
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
It is the height of stupidity to claim that men who for a thousand years have had the power to berate us, to fleece us and to oppress us with impunity, will now agree, with good grace, to be our equals. — Jean-Paul Marat
In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English? — Marlene Dietrich
I do a real analysis of who actually owns things - it’s the British…the Dutch…then it’s the Arabs…then it’s the French…then it’s the Jews…and then, on down the line. — Alex Jones
Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough. — Mark Twain
France Quotes
I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France. — Louis XVI of France
I think it is just terrible and disgusting how everyone has treated Lance Armstrong, especially after what he achieved winning seven Tour de France races while on drugs......When I was on drugs I couldn't even find my bike. — Willie Nelson
You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa. — Dave Barry
According to traditional wisdom in rural France, a baby in the womb should be compared to fruit on the tree. Not all the fruit on the same tree is ripe at the same time...we must accept that some babies need a much longer time than others before they are ready to be born. — Michel Odent
France turned a deaf ear to the demands, but Ho had succeeded in attracting great publicity in progressive French circles to the situation in Indochina. — Wilfred Burchett
My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." - Aunt Frances — Alice Hoffman
France generates a significant part of its energy requirements from fission reactors and these have achieved a perfect safety record. We build ours all differently. — Wilson Greatbatch
In France we have a law which doesn't allow the press to publish a photo that you didn't approve. It lets the paparazzi take the picture, but if they publish this picture, you have the choice to sue the newspaper. So me, I always sued them. — Audrey Tautou
Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival? — Theodore Bikel
I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day. — Xiaolu Guo
The only true language in the world is a kiss. — Alfred De Musset
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
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. — Mark Twain
German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry.... Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts "beauty." It tries to be truthful. — Paul Celan
French is the language that turns dirt into romance. — Stephen King
Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French. — Aravind Adiga
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
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
French Love Quotes
The only consistent hobby I've had is studying Spanish and French because of some delusion of grandeur to work around the world. I love sports but usually I'm looking for the next job. — William Sanderson
When he takes me in his arms, and speaks to me softly, I see the world through rose-colored glasses. — Edith Piaf
That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3 — Albert Camus
I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. — Helmut Newton
French fries. I love them. Some people are chocolate and sweets people. I love French fries. That and caviar. — Cameron Diaz
Love makes the greatest pleasures and most sensitive misfortunes of life. — Madeleine de Scudery
French Poetry Quotes
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went. — Paul Auster
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published. — Sally Kirkland
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. — Robert Morgan
In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry. — Bertrand Russell
How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy. — Adam Hochschild
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table. — Paul Auster
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
Let's be honest - Bill Murray was onto something when he laughed at Andie MacDowell's degree in 19th century French poetry in 'Groundhog Day'. — Marco Rubio
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
I hate French poetry. What measured glitter! — Israel Zangwill
French Wine Quotes
Whoever would have guessed that in the land of cheap sausages and mashed potatoes there could be such a change which would actually bring the French from Paris every weekend to invade Britain en masse to eat great food and drink great wine. — Robin Leach
The older I get, the better I used to be. — Lee Trevino
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
Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized. — Andre Simon
Wine to me is passion. It's family and friends. It's warmth of heart and generosity of spirit. — Robert Mondavi
If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good? — Cardinal Richelieu
I see myself as an ambassador of French heritage and French culture. — Bernard Arnault
The real reason French women don't get fat is not genetic, but cultural, and if the French subjected themselves to the American extremes of eating and dieting, the obesity problem in France would be much worse than what has struck America. — Mireille Guiliano
Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist. — Masaharu Morimoto
French girls still have the Jane Birkin culture. You can go just like that, without makeup, without managing your hair. — Emmanuelle Alt
It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French. — James A. Baldwin
France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything. — Adam Michnik
Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures. — Bob Cousy
Cooperation called fraternity in the classic French formula is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is personal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to develop (markedly so in the economic phase) which subordinated cooperativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the decline in the two latter. — John Dewey
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
French culture takes ageing very seriously. There's much less ageism than in Anglo-Saxon countries. — Kristin Scott Thomas
All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely. — Lawrence Durrell
I believe only in French culture and consider everything in Europe that calls itself 'culture' a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture. — Friedrich Nietzsche
French women love to shop and prepare food. They love to talk about what they have bought and made. It's a deeply natural love, but one that is erased in many other cultures. Most French women learn it from their mothers, some from their fathers. But if your parents aren't French, you can still learn it yourself. — Mireille Guiliano
From time immemorial, soups and broths have been the worldwide medium for utilizing what we call the kitchen byproducts or as the French call them, the 'dessertes de la table' (leftovers), or 'les parties interieures de la bete', such as head, tail, lights, liver, knuckles and feet. — Louis Pullig De Gouy
Inter-railers are the ambulatory equivalent of Macdonald's, walking testimony to the erosion of French culture. — Alice Thompson
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
Generally, the French highly promote culture and the arts, and photography is in their blood. — Herb Ritts
I am very interested in writers from the Francophone world. I like Kamel Daoud a lot, for example. In "The Meursault Investigation" and "Zabor," he shows a passion for the French language, a very special way of writing that belongs to those who live on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. It is language that connects us. It allows people there to cling to our history, our culture and sometimes also our values. — Emmanuel Macron
What Abraham Lincoln had to face was a culturally and politically cohesive bloc of states comprising half the country, refusing to discuss even the limitation of slavery; while he had only the most feeble means of enforcement. The British and the French could do their emancipating at a distance; Lincoln had armed resistance almost literally at his doorstep. — Allen C. Guelzo
Geographically speaking, I was born on a French island - the île d'Oléron. Otherwise, I come from a milieu where culture was of the utmost importance. I learned music even before I learned to read. I always read books beyond my years. — Pierre Berge
I've always been so intrigued by French language and how it completely changes you, because of cultural context, because of humor. — Freya Mavor
I feel very close to French culture and to the French humanism, which occasionally one finds, even in the highest places. And therefore, all of my books have been written in French. — Elie Wiesel
The French movies that are promoted abroad are the ones that give a trendy, cultural, petit bourgeois, upper class image of France, but it's true that people who are poor in France are the same in New York or in India. — Gaspar Noe
I couldn't know about my culture, my history, without learning the language, so I started learning Arabic - reading, writing. I used to speak Arabic before that, but Tunisian Arabic dialect. Step by step, I discovered calligraphy. I painted before and I just brought the calligraphy into my artwork. That's how everything started. The funny thing is the fact that going back to my roots made me feel French. — eL Seed
Being hapa, or more specifically, half-Japanese half-Euro mutt (English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, French, Welsh, German. . .in case you were wondering), has definitely helped shape who I am. It's very cool to get to identify and learn about all these unique cultures and I think it's helped put the world in perspective. — Kina Grannis
Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the "best" American higher criticism. — Camille Paglia
But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French. — Doris Lessing
One of the facets of growing up the way I did, I never had the experience of being solely in the black community. Even my family, my mother is what they call Creole, so she's part French, part black, and grew up in Louisiana. It's a very specific kind of blackness that is different than what is traditionally thought of as the black community and black culture. So, I never felt a part of whatever that was. — Justin Simien
It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe. — John Dos Passos
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. And I loved it. — Charlotte Rampling
When you live in America, it's kind of insular - the news coverage that you get - unless you're really smart about it and find more international news coverage. I've learned that from my husband. In the French culture, they talk politics. — Kim Raver
Her voice was slightly accented but her French was perfect. Someone who'd not just learned the language but loved it. And it showed with every syllable. Gamache knew it was impossible to split language from culture. That without one the other withered. To love the language was to respect the culture. — Louise Penny
In Conclusion
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