this disinhibiting effect is particularly important to the English, who have a greater need for such social facilitators than other cultures.
among English men, uselessness at shopping is also a significant source of pride
There is a tacit understanding among English shoppers to the effect that shopping is not an act of spending, but an act of saving.. You do not speak of having 'spent' x amount on an item of food or clothing, but of having 'saved' x amount on the item.
Only brash, crass Americans display their wealth by boasting about how much something cost them.
the English really are quite capable of Latin-Mediterranean warmth, enthusiasm and hospitality; … It is just that these qualities are only consistently expressed in our interactions with animals.
English couples who have trouble expressing their feelings to each other often tend to communicate through their pets.
To a Spanish person, the important things in life are his family, his friends, his church and his country.
Sometimes it seems that everybody in Madrid lives outdoors all the time, because there are always so many people on the streets all day and all night.
boys and girls do not walk together. Two or three girls will walk by, arm-in-arm, and several boys will walk by, talking together and looking at the girls from the corner of their eyes.
Every big city has a great bullring... Bullfighters in Spain are the same heroes to Spanish boys and girls that baseball players are to American youngsters.
I was pleased with what we are taught to call the habitual politeness of even the lowest order of French people
I think the animation universally displayed in the countenances of the fairer sex particularly striking, and certainly preferable to that want of expression so often to be found among my countrywomen.
An English maid servant who had kept up this sort of badinage would most probably have been a girl of light character; but servants in France are indulged in a playful familiarity of speech and manner which is amusing to witness, and seldom (if ever) prevents them from treating you with every essential respect and attention.
You would never see such a thing in any English country inn, and I consider the French in these sort of decorations to possess far better taste than ourselves.
The ricks of corn and hay here are constructed rather in a slovenly manner: the French farmers seem to have no idea of the neat method of the English, in this respect.
The only good things we met with were beds; indeed we have been fortunate in that respect every where, and the linen throughout France is excellent and plentiful.
the French custom of gilding so much and so gaudily
The French drivers differ in many particulars from ours; The former talk a good deal (en route) to their horses, while the latter confine themselves to the mute eloquence of the whip and spur.
The French drivers differ in many particulars from ours; ... The former talk a good deal (en route) to their horses, while the latter confine themselves to the mute eloquence of the whip and spur.
the French are, beyond all doubt, an innately filthy race,—with them l'apparence is all in all.
The parents throughout France are remarkable for love of offspring.
Certainly drunkenness is not the vice of the nation
The garçon who waited at dinner was a fine specimen of the honest, cheerful French peasant lad, his countenance and manner the perfection of good humour and simplicity.
Upon which Monsieur came behind me, and, supporting me under both the elbows, almost carried me up the stairs to the door of our apartment; so obsequious are the French to all women.
exquisite and well chosen prints, from the designs of Poussin and other old masters; rather in better style, it must be allowed, than those of most English inns
they formed exceptions, in this instance, to some other Italian innkeepers, by whom we were considerably annoyed and disgusted; the system of cheating and over-rating on their parts,
quite a novelty to those who like ourselves had been accustomed to the reserve (I may say ultra-reserve) of many Englishwomen.
the genius of an Italian is so peculiarly indigenous to his native soil, so intimately and vitally dependant upon the favouring and animating breath of his own ardent clime, as to faint, droop, and often wholly to wither, in the chilling atmosphere of foreign lands
... Our countrymen, many of whom have listened to all commendations of other nations, as if they were so many insults offered to our own.
the superior excellence of the Italian school of music—superior (as all real judges must allow) to ours or any other.
Nothing can be more suddenly and accurately marked than the difference of feature, as well as costume, between the Italian and Swiss peasants
there was no such thing as a pretty cottage; and the costumes of the people were gross and tasteless in the greatest degree.
We have frequently met with better accommodations (because cleanliness has been scrupulously attended to) in the inferior inns of Switzerland than in the most superb hotels of Paris, Turin, Milan &c.
The French mistress who would interfere with the vocal self-training of her maid in a kitchen which, generally speaking, is but a few steps from where she sits, would expose herself to an impertinence and perhaps to a far from flattering comment on her own practising on the piano.
how extraordinary it is that this nation, from time immemorial to the present day, should have been so totally ignorant of the true genius of vocal music.
One of them (like most French servants) chatted in a natural intelligent manner, was full of frolic and glee, ready to laugh at every thing, carolling with the gaiety of a lark, in all parts of the house,
There is, I think (generally speaking), a greater suavity and benevolence in the manners of a Frenchman of birth and education; there is a higher degree of polish in his address;
we could not but be forcibly struck with the superiority of appearance and deportment displayed by our English officers ... I must decidedly award the preference to our manly, graceful, dignified countrymen.
The the lower classes of my countrywomen certainly did appear what is called dowdy and heavy, and the general expression of face was somewhat sullen, in comparison.
here were full as many powdered heads and long queues as before the revolution. Frenchmen, in general, will, I am persuaded, ever be Frenchmen in their dress, which, in my opinion, can never be revolutionized
Her natural cheerfulness and vivacity spread over her features an animation seldom to be found in our English fair, whose general characteristics are reserve and coldness.
Her natural cheerfulness and vivacity spread over her features an animation seldom to be found in our English fair, whose general characteristics are reserve and coldness.
It is no longer a matter of surprise to me that the French women dance so well, since I find that they take frequent lessons from their master, and, almost every night, they are at a dance of one kind or another.
Nothing short of the creative genius of the French could contrive to give, again and again, a new form to things the most common. In vain do females of other countries attempt to vie with them; in articles of tasteful fancy they still remain unrivaled.
Whether Voltaire's idea be just, that coffee clears the brain, and stimulates the genius, I will not pretend to determine: but if this be really the case, it is no wonder that the French are so lively and full of invention;
a Frenchman, from the nature of his character, ends by forgetting his misfortunes and losses, cares little for the future, and appears desirous to enjoy the present only
the Parisians still preserve towards foreigners that urbanity for which they were remarkable half a century ago
civilized nations adhere to their ancient customs for no other reason than because they are ancient. The French have, above all, a most decided partiality for those which afford them opportunities of amusement.
Prefer short words and short sentences
Personal liberty, freedom of expression, and wisdom in compromise, the two-party system not shaken by communism or fascism,.. the distrust of the sweeping statement ... the eminently civilised faith in honesty and fair play, the patient queuing…
the almost complete absence in all English art of the so-called Grand Manner, the large, monumental, rhetorical painting of religious or mythological subjects which plays so predominant a part in the art of the Baroque
art is a medium for preaching and the most effective sermon is the recounting of what the observant eye sees around. Both are English attitudes…. recounting what the eye sees, is eternally English.
… it is not only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we find the English as the keenest observers. We can go back to the Middle Ages and find the same qualities in English art there.
any history of philosophy will show you the firm and lasting concern of the English with realities and facts rather than ideals and systems.
the architecture of the spinning mill, that most matter-of-fact, most utilitarian architecture, is originally English, and so is the architecture of the iron bridge and the iron and glass architecture of the Crystal Palace.
in 18th century England it seems to me that there was a national disposition in favour of (wrapping buildings up in clothes not made for them), because the costume tells a story, it is an evocative not a strictly aesthetic quality.
‘Every case on its own merit’ is in my opinion one of the greatest blessings of English civilisation whether you are dealing with the higher walks of administration or with some detail of daily life.
I feel ready to forsake French logicality without a murmur of regret—a logicality which shows itself in the irrevocable 'C’est interdit' or 'C’est impossible', when one tries, out of the blue, to see not even a private house but, say, a school housed in a former monastery.
These men and women seem to be intent on’ doing what Jane Austen in Emma calls ‘the true English style’: ‘burying under a calmness that seems all but indifference, the real attachment’.
Most large-scale English sculpture of the thirteenth century is inferior to that of France, most large-scale English sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries inferior to that of Germany
The English have, I would still insist, nothing of the Italian, the Mediterranean, confidence in the body. The nude has been a rarity in English painting over centuries. England has not produced Baroque art.
Baroque, as practised in Italy and later in southern Germany and Austria, is so impregnated with a sense of body that you can never get away from it: curving interiors, curving façades, crowds of painted and stucco bodies
the English garden, as the French and Germans call the landscape garden, was one of the greatest creations of England in the eighteenth century.
I suggest that the English garden is English in a number of ways, all profoundly significant.
England's faith in tolerance and in individualism had prevented her from checking the fatal effects on the appearance of towns of the rapid growth of industry and urban population.
Mr. Henry Moore, and with him England can boast the greatest living sculptor. The greatest living sculptor, as the product of the most unsculptural nation.
curious coming from Germans, whom I have generally found to be very rational people.
Germans seem to view standing ovations differently than Americans. At this concert, as at the others, the applause went on and on, but nobody stood up.
I regret to say that British historians (or should I say English?) have been a particularly poisonous breed (I say it objectively; to the best of my knowledge, I have never been attacked by a British historian).
I love the polite, everyday formality of France – the greetings, the handshakes, the lot. They open a breathing space of mutual respect apparently lost on our island to ambient mateyness.
if they're talking food-shop displays, I'll make an exception. The French are simply brilliant at them.
the French, whose society had rigid hierarchies for many centuries, place a greater, if subtle, emphasis on boundaries and distance -- between public and private space; between and among social and generational groups; and between strangers and intimates.
we regard the French as snobby and too formal
The French “appear to place a higher value on ‘quality of life’ than do Americans, in terms of appreciation of food, leisure time and vacation. They will even strike to maintain these benefits!”
Americans and French share a deep commitment to democratic values and individual liberties
With economic gloom compounding France's innate pessimism, the satirists are doing record trade with la dérision, as the French call their style of corrosive mockery.
we, French people, are very good at that, disagreeing with each other and then debating the issue for as long as possible
the general understanding that the one who pays has all the rights, and the one that is being paid is basically a slave to the former one just doesn’t apply in France.
American women always smile
At first sight, it may seem that most Parisian women don’t like to have fun. Even when they go out, they act serious, don’t smile much, drink just a little because they don’t want to be drunk and those sorts of things.
the same music produces such different effects in the people of the two nations that it seems inconceivable, the one so calm and the other so transported.
the same music produces such different effects in the people of the two nations that it seems inconceivable, the one so calm and the other so transported.
...the English resolve to kill themselves when one can imagine no reason for their decisions; they kill them- selves in the very midst of happiness.
... a people who rest in no situation, who constantly pinch themselves to find the painful spots, could scarcely fall asleep.
England has always made its political interests give way to the interests of its commerce.
In England, where customs are imposed directly, there is a singular ease in trade: a word in writing accom- plishes the greatest business
The French have been driven nine times out of Italy, because, as historians say, of their insolent familiarities with the fair sex.
Laziness is the effect of pride; labour, a consequence of vanity. The pride of a Spaniard leads him to decline labour; the vanity of a Frenchman to work better than others.
Laziness is the effect of pride; labour, a consequence of vanity. The pride of a Spaniard leads him to decline labour; the vanity of a Frenchman to work better than others.
The Spaniards have been in all ages famous for their honesty... But this admirable quality, joined to their indolence, forms a mixture whence such effects result as to them are most pernicious.
the precariousness of their subsistence inspires them with a prodigious activity, and such an excessive desire of gain, that no trading nation can confide in them.
the long, but noble Speeches of Cinna, and Augustus, in Corneille, could not be tolerated upon the English Stage.
The Italian Softness, their Witticism, so often degenerating into Conceit…
the Exactness and Perspicuity of the French...
the pompous and metaphorical Stile of the Spaniard
The restraint, cautiousness and contact-avoidance of English public-transport passengers - the standoffishness that foreigners complain about - are all characteristic features of 'negative politeness'.