France Quotes: 28 Sourced Lines, and the French Sayings People Also Mean
Quotes about France with the book, the letter and the year attached, the French sayings the same search is really after, and the two famous lines that are told wrong almost everywhere.
France quotes are two searches wearing one name. Half the people typing it want lines written about France by the travellers who fell for it. The other half want French sayings, the maxims and proverbs that sound better in the original. Page one of Google blends the two without ever saying so, and sources neither.
This page separates them. Twenty-one lines about France, from Laurence Sterne in 1768 to Hemingway in 1926, each matched this week against the complete text it comes from, with the chapter, letter or date printed so you can check us. Then five French sayings with the original, a plain English rendering and the book they actually come from. And two corrections, because the most repeated France quote and the most repeated France joke both have a problem nobody mentions.
If you want the wider library first, it is at travel quotes. The two city pages that sit under this one so far are Florence quotes and Rome quotes.
What are the best France quotes? The 60-second answer
If France is calling
Almost every writer below found the France they remembered somewhere other than where they were told to look: a canal lock in Picardy, a hill road in the Cévennes, a chateau town on the Loire. The tours and tickets below are drawn live from GetYourGuide for France. The honest version of the advice on this page: book the train legs early, because the fast French trains fill up and the cheap fares go first, then leave a day with nothing in it outside Paris.
The Fitzgerald line, in two wordings, with the source
The most repeated France quote in English sits on page one of Google three times and inside the AI Overview, in two different wordings, and not one of those pages says where it comes from. It is not from a novel and not from a letter. It is from a newspaper interview Fitzgerald gave after coming home from more than two years in France, and both of his major biographers quote it.
France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.
First arrivals: the travellers who wrote France down
Four arrivals across a hundred years. Sterne invented the sentimental travel book on this crossing, Smollett wrote the grumpiest letters of the century from it, and Jefferson spent five years in Paris and left with a verdict. Twain turned up in 1867 expecting to be unimpressed by everything and was, briefly, impressed by the trains.
They order, said I, this matter better in France.
The first line of the book, spoken in England before he has even left, and his companion immediately asks whether he has been to France. He has not, yet. Sterne then crosses from Dover to Calais on a whim, which is roughly the most relatable travel decision in eighteenth-century literature. The line has been borrowed by every English writer since who wanted to complain about England.
Every object seems to have shrunk in its dimensions since I was last in Paris.
Smollett is the counterweight on this page, and he earns his place. He was ill, recently bereaved, and heading south to winter at Nice, and he found the Louvre, the Palais-Royal and the Seine all smaller than he remembered. The next sentence is the useful one: when memory is not very correct, he says, imagination betrays it into extravagance. Anyone who has gone back somewhere has felt that.
Which would be your second choice? France.
This is the real Jefferson line behind the famous fake one. He sets it up as a question you could put to any well-travelled person: in what country would you rather live? Your own, naturally, where your friends and family are. And your second choice? France. It is gentler and funnier than the misquote, and it is his. The misquote, and where it actually comes from, is card 27.
In France, all is clockwork, all is order.
Twain crossed France by rail in 1867 on the way to Paris, and for once in the book he is not joking. He is comparing French railways with American ones and the French come out ahead: the cars run on time, nobody is allowed to be careless, and the dinner stop is a full thirty minutes. The same chapter praises the country as “a pleasant land”, which from Twain is close to a love letter.
One book is worth reading before a first trip, and it is the one quoted most on this page.
The Innocents Abroad (Signet Classics)
Best for: The book to read before France, if you would rather be entertained than instructed
Twain’s France and Paris chapters, twelve to sixteen, supply three of the lines on this page, and the rest of the book covers the same trip south into Italy. Two honest notes before you buy anything. The text is out of copyright and free in full at Project Gutenberg, which is exactly where we checked every Twain line here. The Signet paperback is worth paying for only if you want a physical copy with an introduction, and it is the cheapest reputable edition of a 560-page book we could find.
Check priceThe free full text of The Innocents Abroad is at Project Gutenberg. For the France material, start at chapter XII.
France beyond Paris: the provinces, the Loire and the road south
Henry James made the case in 1884 and nobody has made it better since. He went to Tours on purpose, to prove that France was more than its capital, and wrote a book about it. Edith Wharton did the same by motor car twenty years later. Stevenson did it by canoe and then by donkey. Read together, these eight lines are an argument for getting on a regional train.
France may be Paris, but Paris is not France; that was perfectly evident on the return to the capital.
The first page of the book, and the thesis of it. James had gone to Tours in the autumn of 1882 intending to test the idea, and a tour of the provinces convinced him. He then admits in the same breath that Balzac discovered the provinces first, if anyone did. This is the line to use if you are the person in your group arguing for leaving Paris after two days.
Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence; but Touraine is essentially France.
Touraine is the country around Tours on the Loire, the old heart of the French monarchy and the chateau belt most people mean when they say the Loire Valley. James is making a real claim: that the regions with the strongest identities are each only themselves, and the gentle, unremarkable-looking middle is where the country as a whole shows through.
I am ashamed to begin with saying that Touraine is the garden of France; that remark has long ago lost its bloom.
“The garden of France” was already a cliché in 1884 and James knew it, which is why he apologises and then says it anyway. The pun on “bloom” is deliberate. It is a useful reminder that the tourist phrases we roll our eyes at were usually true first.
The motor-car has restored the romance of travel.
The first sentence of the book. Wharton’s point is that the railway had turned travel into getting from one station to the next, and the car gave back the in-between: the villages, the roadside churches, the town you had not planned to stop in. Swap the car for a hire car or a bicycle and the argument holds up a century later.
Never more vividly than in this Seine country does one feel the amenity of French manners, the long process of social adaptation which has produced so profound and general an intelligence of life.
Manners and intelligence, side by side, in 1908. Fitzgerald’s famous version in card 1 came nineteen years later, and he knew Wharton’s work. We are not claiming he borrowed it. We are saying that the idea of France as the country of good manners and good sense was already settled among American writers before he made it quotable.
And in looking at it one feels once more, as one so often feels in trying to estimate French architecture or the French landscape, how much of her total effect France achieves by elimination.
“By elimination” is the phrase to keep. Wharton is describing what France leaves out: no clutter, no overstatement, a landscape and a building style that get their effect by restraint. It is the sharpest short explanation of why a French village square looks the way it does.
Now, what I like so much in France is the clear unflinching recognition by everybody of his own luck.
Stevenson canoed from Antwerp down into northern France by river and canal in 1876, and this is from the stop at Landrecies on the Sambre. He means that the French he met did not pretend to be unhappy about their good fortune or apologise for it. It is an unusually precise observation, and anyone who has watched a long French lunch unfold will know exactly what he means.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Everybody knows this line. Almost nobody knows it was written in France, on a bleak upland road in the Cévennes between two villages Stevenson frankly could not see the point of. That is the context that sharpens it: he is not celebrating a beautiful destination, he is admitting that the moving was the point, and the place was not. It is the one line on this page we have used before, on other pages.
On the French themselves
Four writers trying to describe a people rather than a place, which is always riskier. Two of them are Americans in Paris a century apart, and they land in almost the same spot.
A more benevolent people I have never known, nor greater warmth and devotedness in their select friendships.
From the paragraph just before his second-choice line, written three decades after he left. He goes on to praise the hospitality of Paris as beyond anything he had thought possible in a large city. He was writing as an old man about the country where he spent five of his most interesting years, so read it with that warmth in mind.
We are measurably superior to the French in some things, but they are immeasurably our betters in others.
The balance in this sentence is the whole joke, and it is a generous one. “Measurably” against “immeasurably” is Twain conceding the larger half of the argument while pretending not to. Most of the book is Twain being rude about Europe. This is him being fair.
The French are the most human of the human race, the most completely detached from the lingering spell of the ancient shadowy world in which trees and animals talked to each other, and began the education of the fumbling beast that was to deviate into Man.
Written in Paris during the last two years of the First World War, for American soldiers and visitors meeting France for the first time. It is a large claim, and Wharton means it as the highest compliment she has: that the French live by reason and taste rather than superstition. Keep the date in mind. She is writing about a country that had just held the line.
Dining is a solemn rite to the French, because it offers the double opportunity of good eating and good talk, the two forms of æsthetic enjoyment most generally appreciated.
The best one-sentence explanation of why a French dinner takes three hours. The meal is only half of it; the conversation is the other half, and both are treated as arts. If you have ever been gently made to feel that you were eating too fast in France, this is the rule you broke.
Paris, in four lines
Four and no more, on purpose. Paris gets its own page, and the best Paris lines should be there rather than spent here. These four are the ones that say something about France as well as about the city.
Errer est humain, flâner est parisien.
In Isabel Hapgood’s English translation: “To stray is human. To saunter is Parisian.” Hugo is describing Bahorel, one of the student revolutionaries, who drifts between cafés and has no habits at all. Flâner has no exact English equivalent: it means to wander a city with no aim and full attention. It is a pun on “to err is human”, and it is the best four words in French about Paris.
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.
The joke is on the Americans, not the French, and it is one of the best-known lines in the book for that reason. It comes from the mock-solemn summing-up at the end of the book, where Twain pretends to list everything wrong with the foreigners. Anyone who has tried their school French at a Paris counter and been answered in English will enjoy it more than they want to admit.
It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris.
Jake Barnes, crossing the Seine by taxi and watching a string of empty barges towed down the current. Hemingway’s Paris is mostly cafés and bad decisions, and this plain eight-word sentence is the gentlest thing in it. It is also true, which is the point: there are more than thirty bridges in the city and most of them are worth slowing down for.
Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.
Said in Paris, by an American who moved to Paris, to a friend who wants to run off to South America. The irony is the point, and a few lines later Jake tells him to start living his life in Paris instead. It is the most honest line about travel on this page: France will not fix you, but it is a very good place to find that out.
French sayings and proverbs, translated and sourced
This is the half of the search that page one blends into the other. Every saying below is printed with its French form, a plain English rendering, and the work it comes from. Where the text we matched was a translation rather than the French original, the card says so and names the translator. English renderings marked “our rendering” are our own literal translations.
Appetite comes with eating, says Angeston, but the thirst goes away with drinking.
This is the literary source of l’appétit vient en mangeant, still used in French to mean that wanting more comes from starting. We matched the classic English translation rather than the sixteenth-century French, and say so. Rabelais gives it to a crowd of drunks at a feast, credits it to a bishop, Angeston, and then immediately turns it into a joke about thirst.
je pense, donc je suis
Our rendering: “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes wrote it first in French, in a book deliberately written in the vernacular rather than Latin so that ordinary readers could follow it. The Latin cogito, ergo sum everyone quotes comes later. It is the most famous French sentence in the world and it is not about travel at all, but it is what half the people searching for French quotes want.
Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.
Our rendering: “That is well said, replied Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.” The last line of the book, after Candide has been round the world and through every disaster the century could offer. It means: stop theorising about whether this is the best of all possible worlds and do the useful work in front of you. It is the best closing line in French literature, and the right one for a traveller who has just got home.
Suz, revenons à ces moutons
Our rendering: “Come now, let us get back to these sheep.” The judge in a medieval courtroom farce, trying to drag a rambling cloth merchant back to the actual case, which is about stolen sheep. Modern French turned it into revenons à nos moutons, let us get back to the subject. It has been in continuous use for about five hundred and seventy years, which is a fair run for a joke.
At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, “Then let them eat pastry!”
This is where qu’ils mangent de la brioche, “let them eat cake”, actually comes from, and it is the correction most people want. Rousseau tells it about an unnamed great princess, in a passage about stealing wine while working as a tutor in Lyon around 1740, fifteen years before Marie Antoinette was born. The line was attached to her only later. We matched the English translation of the Confessions, which renders brioche as pastry. Nobody has ever produced evidence that she said it.
Paris, the Loire and the south: where the lines were written
Most of the writers on this page were not in Paris when they wrote the line that lasted. Here is where they actually were, which doubles as a rough itinerary for a second trip.
Where each line was written
| Region | Writer and year | What they found there |
|---|---|---|
| Paris | Hugo 1862, Twain 1869, Hemingway 1926 | Wandering as an art, the language barrier as a joke, and the bridges over the Seine |
| Touraine and the Loire | Henry James, 1884 | The argument that the quiet middle of the country is the real France |
| The Seine valley, Rouen to Fontainebleau | Edith Wharton, 1908 | French manners and the intelligence of everyday life, by motor car |
| The northern canals, Sambre and Oise | Robert Louis Stevenson, 1878 | Small towns seen at water level, and people unembarrassed by their luck |
| The Cévennes | Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879 | A hard upland road and the discovery that moving was the point |
| Nice and the Riviera | Tobias Smollett, 1763 to 1765 | A winter on the coast that produced the grumpiest travel letters of the century |
Each of those rows will get its own page in time. Paris is next.
The France lines that do not check out
Two corrections, and they fail in different ways. The first is a real line with the wrong man’s name on it. The second is probably real and the number in it is not. Both are printed on things you can buy in any Paris souvenir shop this afternoon.
Tout homme a deux pays, le sien et puis la France!
Our rendering: “Every man has two countries, his own and then France.” It is a line from a patriotic verse play, spoken by Charlemagne, written half a century after Jefferson died. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello lists the Jefferson attribution as a spurious quotation. The credit probably sticks because Jefferson did write something close to it, which is card 4. Use his version with his name on it, or this one with de Bornier’s.
Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?
Our rendering: “How can you govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?” He probably did say something like it, and more than once. The trouble is the number. The earliest known English printing, in Time on 16 March 1962, gives 227. Mignon’s collection later that year gives 246. The 258 you usually see comes later, and other books give 250, 262, 265, 270, 350, 365 and 400. There is no recording and no fixed occasion. The full chain of printings is set out by Citations vérifiées, linked below.
Sources for both corrections: the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s entry on the spurious Jefferson line at Monticello, and the dossier of every printed cheese count at Citations vérifiées.
Corrections like these are a standing series here, and the full set lives in the travel quote fact-check hub.
Notes on the selection
How these twenty-eight were chosen. Every line from a book was matched this week against the complete text it comes from, downloaded from Project Gutenberg or read on Wikisource, rather than copied from another list. Where a work has a chapter, a letter or a date, it is printed so you can check us. Three lines rest on credible secondary sources instead, and those cards say so: Fitzgerald’s interview, the de Bornier play, and the de Gaulle printings. Twenty-seven of the twenty-eight are first-time verifications for this site. The Stevenson line is the one we have used before.
Cut, and why. The brief for this page asked for thirty. It has twenty-eight, because that is what checked out, and a round number is not worth an unsourced card. Hemingway’s “moveable feast” line is deliberately saved for the Paris page. Edward Hopper’s line about Paris being the most beautiful city on earth is cut because we could not find the letter or interview it comes from. Proust and Flaubert are both French and both have their own pages here, at Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert, but their best travel lines are about memory and the Orient rather than about France itself, so they are not spent here.
How we decide what counts as a source is set out at editorial standards. If the France you are working towards is the one where you are not counting annual leave, vagabonding is the practical argument and start here is the honest place to begin.
Questions people ask about France quotes
What is the most famous quote about France?
In English it is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older”, and the two things, he says, are “intelligence and good manners”. It comes from a 1927 newspaper interview in the New York World, as quoted by his biographers Matthew Bruccoli and André Le Vot. The attested wording is “toward” and “good manners”. The versions reading “towards” or plain “manners” are later drift.
What are short France quotes for Instagram?
Three short ones with a real source attached, which most captions do not have. “They order, said I, this matter better in France.” Laurence Sterne, 1768. “France may be Paris, but Paris is not France.” Henry James, 1884. And for a photograph of the Seine, “It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926. Credit the writer and the year and the caption does double duty.
What is a famous French saying?
Revenons à nos moutons, literally “let us get back to our sheep”, meaning let us get back to the subject. It comes from La Farce de Maître Pathelin, an anonymous comedy of about 1457, where a judge keeps trying to drag a rambling witness back to a case about stolen sheep. The original line reads revenons à ces moutons. The translation is our own.
Did de Gaulle really say 246 cheeses?
Probably something like it, but not with one fixed number. The earliest English printing, in Time magazine on 16 March 1962, gives 227 varieties. Ernest Mignon’s collection Les Mots du Général, published later in 1962, gives 246. The popular 258 is later still, and other books give numbers up to 400. There is no recording and no single agreed occasion, so any exact figure you see quoted is somebody’s retelling.
Check the wording against what you have seen. The attested form is “toward”, not “towards”, and “good manners”, not “manners”. It comes at the end of a short run of lines in the same interview that begins “The best of America drifts to Paris”, which is the context that makes it make sense: he is justifying expatriation to an American newspaper. It is a secondary source, because the 1927 page itself is not online, and we say so rather than dress it up. Worth knowing too: Edith Wharton said nearly the same thing about French manners and intelligence nineteen years earlier. She is card 10.