《文化对语言理解的重要性》中提到海涅的一句话：“近来法国人认为，如果他们接触到德国文学的精品，就可以了解德国了。其实他们只不过是从完全的蒙昧无知，进入到浮浅表皮的层次而已。只要他们没有认识宗教和哲学在德国的意义，对他们说来，我们文学当中的精品就永远只是一些无言的花朵，整个德国精神就只会显得枯涩难解。”（见：张隆溪《翻译与文化理解》）

另外，英国作家吉.基.切斯特顿（Gilbert Keith Chesterton，1874年~1936年）有一篇文章《法国人和英国人》：“French and English” by G.K. Chesterton - Men …

https://www.menofthewest.net/french-and-english-by-g-k-chesterton/

文章认为英国人和法国人在文化与性情之间存在很大差异。

约翰·斯图尔特·穆勒（ John Stuart Mill ）的《我的知识之路》（Autobiography of John Stuart Mill）看到一段对英国人的批评，如英国人的情感不外露，缺乏与别人交流，对公共事务不关心等。

“Having  so little experience of English life, and the few people I knew being  mostly such as had public objects, of a large and personally  disinterested kind, at heart, I was ignorant of the low moral tone of  what, in England, is called society'. the habit of, not indeed  professing, but taking for granted in every mode of implication, that  conduct is of course always directed towards low and petty objects; the  absence of high feelings which manifests itself by sneering depreciation  of all demonstrations of them, and by general abstinence (except among a  few of the stricter religionists) from professing any high principles  of action at all, except in those preordained cases in which such  profession is put on as part of the costume and formalities of the  occasion. I could not then know or estimate the difference between this  manner of existence, and that of a people like the French, whose faults,  if equally real, are at all events different; among whom sentiments,  which by comparison at least may be called elevated, are the current  coin of human intercourse, both in books and in private life; and though  often evaporating in profession, are yet kept alive in the nation at  large by constant exercise, and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a  living and active part of the existence of great numbers of persons, and  to be recognized and understood by all. Neither could I then appreciate  the general culture of the understanding, which results from the  habitual exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the  most uneducated classes of several countries on the Continent, in a  degree not equalled in England among the so-called educated, except  where an unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual exercise  of the intellect on questions of right and wrong. I did not know the way  in which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things  of an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and  there, and the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to  themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, causes both  their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain undeveloped,  or to develope themselves only in some single and very limited  direction; reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to a kind of  negative existence. All these things I did not perceive till long  afterwards; but I even then felt, though without stating it clearly to  myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and amiability of  French personal intercourse, and the English mode of existence in which  everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or no exceptions) was  either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true, the bad as well as the  good points, both of individual and of national character, come more to  the surface, and break out more fearlessly in ordinary intercourse,  than in England: but the general habit of the people is to show, as well  as to expect, friendly feeling in every one towards every other,  wherever there is not some positive cause for the opposite. In England  it is only of the best bred people, in the upper or upper middle ranks,  that anything like this can be said.”（FROM：Autobiography of John Stuart Mill）