Intellectual French Quotes & Sayings

Or possibly- forgive me- you simply haven't decided what you want from life yet; you haven't found anything that you truly want to hold onto. That changes everything, you know. Students and very young people can rent with no damage to their intellectual freedom, because it puts them under no threat: they have nothing, yet, to lose. Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. All of a sudden you're playing for keeps, as children say, and it changes the very fabric of you. — Tana French

French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe. — Camille Paglia

The superiority of chocolate (hot chocolate), both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain. — Thomas Jefferson

Drinking is a fast-forward button; it makes you feel close to a person so quickly. — Alison Rosen

We live our lives from A-Z, but forget the other 24 letters in between. — Timothy Leary

For the French, an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job. — Michel Houellebecq

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

The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance. — A.A. Gill

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage. — Noam Chomsky

American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity. — Fanny Kemble

The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic. — Pankaj Mishra

When Benjamin Franklin, the famous inventor and publisher, was serving as the American ambassador to France, he often impressed French intellectual with the wisdom of his remarks. At one dinner, the question was raised, "What human condition deserves the most pity?" Each of the guests responded, but the answer that is still remembered is Benjamin Franklins's: "A lonesome man on a rainy day who does not know how to read. — Paul Kropp

Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant. — Erma Bombeck

Another day without being arrested for murder and/or covering up a murder was a good day in my book. — Darynda Jones

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

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth - and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth - and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere. — Boris Johnson

Because art as a pursuit, as a concept, as an ideal, constantly elevates one above the pragmatic, one is inclined to discuss art in heightened terminologies. For me, it is just what I do all day long. — Ralph Gibson

I believe Korea is making the best movies. Only in Korea - you can do whatever you want to without any rating system or whatever. They can make world-class karate movies and make lots of money, which is very important. — Ryuhei Kitamura

Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or "mental worth." In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created "does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured." Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. "Some recent thinkers," he said, "[have affirmed] that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing. — Ken Robinson

I don't leave my house - I don't care if it's raining or scorching hot out - without a face cream with a minimum of SPF 15, if not more. — Tiffany Dupont

In other words, you're justifying the Hundred Years' War.'

'More or less. For it enabled our two peoples to become deeply interdependent, allowing the most fruitful of intellectual exchanges.'

'You mean, the French are "anglicized" without knowing it.'

'And the English have assimilated their Continental experience from that time much more than you think. But this is what I was leading up to: the Englishman is essentially a mystical being. And, because he's scrupulous, he's apprehensive. And therefore susceptible to everything that might be interpreted as a superhuman manifestation, whether it be a legend of esoteric significance - as in this case - or an event of peculiar resonance. Don't forget, all the official bodies in Paris - parliament, clergy, and especially the university - were in favour of the English at the period I'm talking about.'

'Of course! — Jacques Yonnet

But we all die, and all death is violent, the overthrowing of the state of life, so why did that year [1968]seem so terrible? Are King or Kennedy or some peasant folk in a village more important than the starved-out of Biafra, the names on the Detroit homicide list? Maybe I'm playing an intellectual game, marking out one year or two on a calendar as special in horror so I can add that they were also special in significance, and thus compensate for the horror, or even redeem it. Humans are fond of finding ways to be grateful for their suffering, calling falls fortunate and deaths resurrection. It's not a bad idea, I guess: since you're going to have the suffering anyway, you might as well be grateful for it. Sometimes, though, I think if we didn't expect the suffering, we wouldn't have so much of it. — Marilyn French

I think in France, for example, we can say whatever we want about the French, but going out and dining is more about the intellectual moment to share with the people you dine with than trying to figure out what the chef did with that little piece of salmon or lobster and all that. — Daniel Boulud

Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of 'postmodernism' I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip. — Eric Hobsbawm

Your promise is someone's hope. It hurts when hope shatters. Keep your promises. — Tarang Sinha

The English mind is intelligent rather than intellectual. The French are intellectual in the sense that the intellect is emancipated and left free to run its own course. — Ralph Barton Perry

All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others. — David McCullough

At the day of judgment we shall all meet again. — George Whitefield

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. — Peter Watts

It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual. — Kenneth Baker

France has not only built a bureaucratic barrier against American culture, it has constructed a notorious intellectual case against it as well. The French spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing film production, extend interest-free loans to designated filmmakers, and have placed quotas not only on imports but on television time. — Tyler Cowen

When you know the truth, the truth makes you a soldier. — Mahatma Gandhi

Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in arms - even when those enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate byproduct of an enlightened society. — Victor Davis Hanson

Many French people were difficult conversationalists. Asking them not only where they were originally from but what they did in life was considered rude - I suppose because many of them did nothing (many Parisians are rentiers, people who live off the rents of their properties) or because they weren't proud of their jobs, which simultaneously supported and interfered with their intellectual and artistic passions. — Edmund White

Humility evolves with every hardship. — Lailah Gifty Akita