50+ Best Quotes About France

Are you looking for quotes about France?

If there are two words that best describe France, it’s timeless and elegant. No wonder it has been one of the most visited countries in the world. Tens of millions of tourists have been flocking to France every year to enjoy what one of the most romantic places on earth can offer. The beauty and charm that made this country a world-class destination are evident in the many popular quotes about France that we have today.

Everything about France, from the cobblestone streets of Paris to the lavender fields of Provence, is a constant source of endless inspiration – from French quotes to love quotes. It inspires authors and great thinkers to come up with these timeless quotes about France.

50+ Best Quotes About France

So if you’re looking for the perfect quotes to better appreciate France or quotes to fuel your wanderlust, check out the collection below. This compilation of quotes make the perfect caption for your Instagram photos, too. So read on and tell us what’s your favorite quote below!

Quotes about Paris France

A lot of quotes about France starts with Paris. As one an art and cultural center, Paris inspires artists and great thinkers alike to come up with these memorable quotes about France.

“To know Paris is to know a great deal.” ― Henry Miller

“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

“Everyone remembers their first taste of Paris.” ― Kristin Hannah

“What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!” ― Charles Dickens

“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

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris.” ― Oscar Wilde

“America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” ― Gertrude Stein

“Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.” — Paula McLain

“As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

“People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.”  ― Roman Payne

“Paris is not a city, it’s a world.”  ― King Francois I 

“A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.” – Thomas Jefferson

“You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.” ― Allen Ginsberg

“He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.” — Victor Hugo

“Paris is always a good idea.” – Audrey Hepburn

“Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes.” ― Henry James

“Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history.” ― Anne Rice

“Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never truly be elegant.” ― Honoré de Balzac 

“Secrets travel fast in Paris.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte

“There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even — the French air clears up the brain and does good — a world of good.” ― Vincent Van Gogh

“I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She’s a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and, yes, for mysteries.”  – M. J. Rose

“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

But of Paris it can be said that the right bank of the Seine belongs to the world, and the left bank to France.” ― Mary Butts

“You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights. I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.” – Owen Wilson

“London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” – Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Quotes about life in France

“I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon — down here everybody thinks he’s Christ.” ―  F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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

“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 to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time.” ― William Arthur Sirmo

“In France, history is paralyzing.”  ― Jean Paul Gaultier

“Every man has two countries: his own and France.” ― John F. Kennedy

“France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.” ―  F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.” ― Gertrude Stein

“France has a clear and defined policy… The French know what they want.” ― Anton Chekhov

“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

“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

“Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.” ― Roland Barthes

“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

“Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.” ― Robert A. Heinlein 

Quotes about foods in France

“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

“The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken.” ―  Julia Child

“I still feel that French cooking is the most important in the world, one of the few that has rules. If you follow the rules, you can do pretty well.” ― Julia Child

“I went to a restaurant that serves “breakfast at any time”. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.” ― Steven Wright 

“How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” ― Charles de Gaulle

“I hate France. It’s like the whole country’s on a diet.” ― Gordon Korman

“In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. I think the French enjoy the complication of the art form and the cooking for cooking’s sake. You can talk with a concierge or police officer about food in France as a general rule. It is not the general rule here. Classical cuisine, which I hope we are going back to, means certain ways of doing things and certain ways of not doing things. If you know classical French cooking you can do anything. If you don’t know the basics, you turn out slop.” ―  Julia Child

Funny Quotes About France

“Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!”― Steve Martin

“Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.” ― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“They have a very low rate for attempted murder and a high rate for successfully concluded murder. It seems that when a French person sets out to kill someone, they make a good job of it.” ― Nick Yapp

 “I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.” ― Josephine Baker

“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

“It’s true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it’s a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.” ― Anita Loos

“France is the country where the money falls apart and you can’t tear the toilet paper.” ― Billy Wilder

“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