50+ Quotes About France You’ll Absolutely Love
Last Updated on 26th June 2024 by Sophie Nadeau
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If you’re looking for some France quotes to inspire a visit, here are 50+ quotes about France you’ll absolutely love (and sayings that will make you want to hop on a flight ASAP)…
France has been the muse for artists, writers, actors, and other creators for centuries. Often nicknamed ‘l’Hexagone’ on account of the fact that the landmass itself resembles a hexagon, the country is at the top of almost everyone’s European bucket lists.
France is the largest country in Europe and can be found in the Western part of the continent. Its capital city is Paris, which is one of the top destinations on Earth for fashion, culture, and food. For inspiration about the French capital, be sure to check out our top quotes about Paris.
50+ Quotes about France
“I wanted to get far away from those who believed in cruelty, so then I went to France, a land of true freedom, democracy, equality and fraternity.” – Josephine Baker
“France has the only two things towards which we drift as we grow older – intelligence and manners.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Far be it from a French man to interfere with love.” – E.A. Bucchianeri
“I can never decide whether Paris is more beautiful by day or by night.” – Adriana in Midnight in Paris
“It is true that in France, women put on less things. If they have a necklace, they don’t put on earrings; if they have nail polish, they don’t put on all their rings and all their bracelets.” – Ines de La Fressange
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” – Ernest Hemingway
“In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.” – Julia Child
“Americans want beauties, not me. I’m not the Parisian bombshell they expected. Can you see me as a chorus girl? Where’s my feather up the ass? They think I’m sad, they’re dumb. I don’t connect to them.” – Edith Piath in La Vie en Rose
“True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee. But why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don’t know.” – P.J. O’Rourke
“Every Frenchman wants to enjoy one or more privileges; that’s the way he shows his passion for equality.” – Charles de Gaulle
“French people are so proud of their wine, they named many French cities after the names of Grand Cru vintage wine” – Oscar Wilde
“The thing that staggers you when you first come to France is the fact that all the French speak French—even the children.” – Olivia de Havilland
“English fondness for France is normally a sort of neutron love: take away the people and leave the buildings standing.” – Anthony Lan
“When I got to France I realized I didn’t know very much about food at all.” – Julia Child
I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.” – Josephine Baker
“The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.” – Mark Zero
“What I gained by being in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country.”- Samuel Johnson
“France may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.” – Lillian Hellman
“French people speak quickly but act slowly.” – Voltaire
“France is the most civilized country in the world and doesn’t care who knows it.” – John Gunther
“Boy, those French. They have a different word for everything.” – Steve Martin
“We’ll always have Paris” – Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca
“Maybe it can’t be proven statistically, but it’s a safe bet that any given American on his or her first trip to France will at some point remark with indignation that he or she had thought the French were supposed to be so polite.” – Jack Iams
“I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.” – Josephine Baker
“I do not believe there is another city on earth so beautiful as Paris nor another people with such an appreciation of the beautiful as the French…” – Edward Hopper
“France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.” – Charles de Gaulle
“Quarrels in France strengthen a love affair, in America they end it.” – Ned Rorem
“English people don’t have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.” – Vivien Leigh
“France has more need of me than I have need of France.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“The French are glad to die for love. They delight in fighting duels. But I prefer a man who lives… and gives expensive… jewels.” – Satine in Moulin Rouge
“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.” – Claude Monet
“The French air cleans up the brain and does good – a world of good.” – Vincent Van Gogh
“Everything ends this way in France – everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs – everything is a pretext for a good dinner.” – French playwright Jean Anouilh
“France is like a maddening, moody lover who inspires emotional highs and lows. One minute it fills you with a rush of passion, the next you’re full of fury, itching to smack the mouth of some sneering shopkeeper or smug civil servant. Yes, it’s a love-hate relationship.” – Sarah Turnbull
“How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” – Charles de Gaulle
“Every man has two countries: his own and France.” – John F. Kennedy
“France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time.” – Lt. William Arthur Sirmon
“God invented Parisians so foreigners wouldn’t understand anything about French people.” – Alexandre Dumas
“In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did invent romance, so they’ve had more time than any other culture on earth to refine the nuances of its language.” – Mark Zero
“So ask the travelled inhabitant of any nation, ‘In what country on earth would you rather live?’ Certainly in my own, where are all my friends, my relations, and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life. Which would be your second choice? France.” – Thomas Jefferson
“Now nothing is real except French wine.” – Conrad Kent Rivers
“I cannot prevent the French from being French.” – Charles de Gaulle
«C’est joli la Bretagne et puis c’est pas loin de la France.» (Brittany is pretty and it’s not far away from France!) – Coluche (French comedian)
“In France, History is paralyzing” – Jean Paul Gaultier
“Paris is not a city, it’s a world” – French King Francois I
You live to work. We work to live.” – Luc in Emily in Paris
“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
“Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I’ve never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.” – Wes Anderson
“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
“There is a French version of the story, and a true one.” – Stephen Clarke
“Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness, because I felt alive. Yes, alive. That was the moment I fell in love with Paris. And I felt Paris fall in love with me.” – Carol in Paris Je t’aime
“The French: a people who have used their sophisticated culture and beautiful language to bequeath to the world the sliced potato.” – Bauvard
“In France you cannot not have lunch. If you stopped the French from having lunch, you will have a second revolution, I can tell you this. Not going to work – it is part of the French privilege.” – Christian Louboutin
“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
“God, it’s good to be eating in France again.” – Jack Iams
“French is the language that turns dirt into romance.” – Stephen King
“France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they’ve forgotten all about it.” – Johnny Depp
The French are romantics, but they’re also realists.” – Mindy in Emily in Paris
“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
“I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world.” – Charles Dickens
“Never doubt the courage of the French. They were the ones who discovered that snails are edible.” – Doug Larson
“It was like the first time I visited Versailles. There was an eerieness like I’d been there before. I don’t know if I was Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette or a lowly groundskeeper, but I lived there.” – Maurice Minnifield in Northern Exposure
“It was then I thought of Corsica, the place we had discovered together. I craved the wind, the sun and salt, the simplicity of the island.” – Lucy Foley
“I had come to the conclusion that I must really be French, only no one had ever informed me of this fact. I loved the people, the food, the lay of the land, the civilized atmosphere, and the generous pace of life.” – Julia Child
“France is beautiful. I stood at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower today and looked up at it. There are very few times in my life I’ve felt so small.” – Leisa Rayven
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