Intelligent French Quotes & Sayings

The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them? — Roger Scruton

Everyone was certain that Engineer Safa would go chasing after his wife or he would die of sorrow. Not so. The engineer neither chased after her nor died of sorrow. He shrugged and said, 'The hell with her.' At first, people were puzzled, but then they remembered that life is a sequence of ephemeral events and a succession of fleeting loves. — Goli Taraghi

A man's home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside is more often his nursery. — Clare Boothe Luce

They are totally in the dark, the whole lot of them. They only pretend to think about important stuff...Sure, they have to use their brains a little to get rich in the first place, but once they make it it's a piece of cake--they don't need to think anymore. Like an orbiting satellite doesn't need gas. They just keep going round and round, always over the same damn place. — Haruki Murakami

Beauty had just squatted under one of the chairs lining the hallway. A small trickle was creeping across the marble floor.
'She's too intelligent to pay mind to me,' Lady Sylvia said blandly. 'All three dogs are French, and they behave just like Frenchmen. Decorative but peevish. — Eloisa James

Everywhere sex is understood to be something females have that males want. — Donald Symons

If you want intelligent children give them a book. If you want more intelligent children give them more books. — Jackie French

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

It is surprising to see how often the worst people in the world - rapists interviewed in prison, say - see themselves as the real victims. They are wrong to see themselves as innocents, but we are wrong as well to see them as different creatures from the rest of us. If you want to think about evil, real evil, a better way to proceed is this: Don't think about what other people have done to you; think instead about your own actions that hurt others, that made others want you to apologize and make amends. Don't think about other nations' atrocities toward your country and its allies; think instead about the actions of your country that other people rage against. Your — Paul Bloom

Frenchwomen don't see pregnancy as a free pass to overeat, in part because they haven't been denying themselves the foods they love - or secretly binging on those foods - for most of their adult lives. "Too often, American women eat on the sly, and the result is much more guilt than pleasure," Mireille Guiliano explains in her intelligent book French Women Don't Get Fat. "Pretending such pleasures don't exist, or trying to eliminate them from your diet for an extended time, will probably lead to weight gain. — Pamela Druckerman

No one could touch the home cooking of an Italian woman. French women, they are very intelligent, very sexy - but they don't like to cook. — Sirio Maccioni

That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing. — Dan Chaon

I always want to be the thing I feel kinship with...
To feel everything in every way,
To hold all opinions,
To be sincere contradicting oneself every minute... — Alvaro De Campos

Unfortunately when I'm on my death bed I believe I'll be like most people and still looking for Jesus. And yes I've checked my sock drawer. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

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

A sweet fate oft hides a sinner's heart. — George R R Martin

A lot of dyslexic kids are actually more intelligent than average and are very good, because they've got very good memories, at disguising the fact that they can't read or have got problems in reading and literacy. — Jackie French

James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [ ... ] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [ ... ] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation.
(Little Review, 1918) — T. S. Eliot

The danger was within itself: it was the crisis of confidence it was going through, the fear of being itself. When you considered them individually, French boys were as active and intelligent as ever. But they lacked the sort of shared hope and dreams which are the sign of health in a people. The fact that the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the Revolution were only funeral commemorations revealed that weakness, that lifelessness. It was so clear — Jean Guehenno

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

I do whatever [comedies] I'm attracted to. It's like the woman who stands out in the crowd, who for some reason you notice, that's the one you're supposed to dance with at that time in your life. That's just what it is with scripts - they find you when you're emotionally in the right place to do them. — Jim Carrey

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

If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English. — Wilfrid Sheed