Top 440 French Quotes

There is a phrase in French, which means ‘to miss.’ To pass by. To not be able to stop. You love someone and someone loves you, but it just can’t work for different reasons.

I’m happy to have a physical part in ‘High Tension,’ in ‘Hereafter,’ and in a lot of French movies and Belgian movies. But its not by chance directors choose me for physical parts. I like to do that. I like to tell a story also with the body. It’s important, because you can tell a lot of things.

Growing up biracial and speaking four languages – French, Chinese, Portuguese, and English – gave me a different lens. I was always very acutely aware of coming from a different perspective. I think that definitely contributed to what I chose to do with my life.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating.

The French people need to have all the facts so they can choose. And I won’t be running away from it or hiding from it.

It’s so French to be a cat person.

I’m a sucker for French fries – I love that they’re salty!

I remember walking the dog one day, I saw a car full of teenage girls, and one of them rolled down the window and yelled, ‘Marc Jacobs!’ in a French accent.

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.

I saw the original that Gela Babluani wrote and directed called ’13 Tzameti,’ and that was very interesting. I believe it was a French film, and I was just intrigued by the awkwardness; the off-beatness of the film really just grasped me.

In the French culture, they talk politics. I didn’t find it was part of our culture to have political arguments at the table. My husband’s family will get into major politics, and it’s not an aggressive thing. It’s so interesting and you learn so much, whether it’s Right or Left, and that to me has been really great.

I had acne late, in college. My skin used to be really flawless. Went to college, became a vegetarian, ate a lot of cheese – big mistake. Here I am trying to be healthy and I’m eating grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries every day, having mad eruptions all over my face.

Usually, jet lag is not this big of an issue for me. I’m not sure why I’m so disoriented this time. It could be due to the amount of chocolate and french fries I’ve eaten in the last two and a half weeks.

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.

I never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words – like ‘pois chiches’ for chick peas!

French Yemeni relations are strong and good, they are relations depending on friendship and cooperation; my relationship with the president Chiraq are old and real.

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.

I guess, being French, I love Hollywood.

In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, ‘Well, you have to die some way or another.’ If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.

I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there’s a good English phrase for it – cold war.

Although the French appellation system has its roots in the 1923 system created in Chateauneuf-du-Pape by Baron Le Roy, proprietor of the renowned Chateau Fortia, Chateauneuf-du-Pape never developed a reputation for quality or achieved the prestige enjoyed by such regions as Burgundy and Bordeaux.

My wife speaks very good French. She said she would miss lots of things in the U.S., but we can’t live there if Trump’s president.

Instead of isolating our school and our many subjects from the every day world, we intend to plant it not merely in the French capital, but in what for next summer at least will be the focal point, the capital of the entire civilized world.

We were only there for five days and during that time Tom was a bit annoyed that the French were more interested in me and my schoolgirl outfit than him and his long scarf.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer’s art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

Written and directed by French showman Georges Melies, ‘Le Voyage’ features one of the most indelible images in cinema history: the wounded Man in the Moon bleeding like a particularly runny Brie, grimacing in pain with a space capsule protruding from his right eye.

I perfectly understood President Obama’s attitude throughout the French presidential campaign. He had no reason to distance himself from Nicolas Sarkozy. It’s the basic solidarity that leaders who worked together owe to each other.

I like to be in a huis clos, as the French say – in one place. It’s something that in general can create a bit of claustrophobia. But for me, claustrophobia becomes almost immediately claustrophilia. I love it!

I love France. The French respect your privacy.

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.

Not in the constitution, but I would propose a law to the French parliament that provides for reducing the budget deficit year by year, until we have reached a balanced budget by 2017.

Esquire, in a July, 1957 issue, has a photograph of me playing the French horn at the Five Spot.

It is a well known urban myth that the French don’t trust banks and store their money under their mattress. It’s not that they are tight with money – they just don’t trust anyone.

I’m an avid cook. Brazilian, some Italian, a little French. And I often throw dinner parties.

It never ceases to surprise me, the people I get to work with. I’m in a French film with Sandrine Bonnaire? I adore Sandrine Bonnaire. I’m doing a picture for Robert Redford? The Sundance Kid? I have to pinch myself sometimes.

When Picasso painted in Paris, was he a Spanish or a French painter? It does not matter, he was Picasso, whatever the influences surrounding him. He simply chose Paris because it was the ideal place for him to sell his creation.

I got into an argument with someone because I said I think 2Pac will be regarded as a great poet. They said he was just a punk gangster. People said the same thing about Francois Villon, and he’s now considered the best French Romantic poet of all time.

I like the Japanese knives, I like French knives. Whatever’s sharp.

I’ve got lots of favourite authors, but I would say Nicci French because I look more forward to reading her next new book than any other author.

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.

I never see my movies. When they’re on television, I click them away. Hollywood created an image, and I long ago reconciled myself with it. I was the French cliche.

I love the French very much, and I think they know that. I’ve been adopted here. They treat me as one of their own.

To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.

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.

I was born in Paris, and my mother was a French teacher, but then I rebelled against my upbringing and studied Spanish in school. So now I just speak bad French and bad Spanish.

Since I was a kid, I inherited my dad’s love for animals and wildlife, even for the ones we had around the house in the French countryside, a ‘smaller’ kind of nature. Then, as I grew up, I looked more deeply into the African continent and its wildlife.

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.

I’m as frustrated with the French, I think, as anyone, but look, there’s going to be other challenges and there are going to be other issues. As long as there’s a war on terrorism going on, we’re all going to have to work together.

There’s the soundtrack to The French Connection II’I think It’s my favorite soundtrack. It hasn’t been released. I actually had to go and get the film and just make a recording of it to get the music.