Quotes about Paris present Paris through the eyes of the Great. After reading these quotes, you will know what to expect from your future travel to Paris. Share this post with your friends and loved ones. Get inspired.
A MOVABLE FEAST • QUOTES ABOUT PARIS
“I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome; But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.”
-Henry Van Dyke
“Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets – as vast and indestructible as nature itself.
A UNIVERSE • QUOTES ABOUT PARIS
All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower.
Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her–and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.”
-Anne Rice
HOME TO WRITERS • QUOTES ABOUT PARIS
“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
“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
FANTASTIC CITY • QUOTES ABOUT PARIS
“The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.”
-Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“We’ll always have Paris.”
-Howard Koch
“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
THE EIFFEL TOWER • QUOTES ABOUT PARIS
“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I like The Eiffel Tower because it looks like steel and lace.”
-Natalie Lloyd
“I guess it goes to show that you just never know where life will take you. You search for answers. You wonder what it all means. You stumble, and you soar. And, if you’re lucky, you make it to Paris for a while.”
“Amy Thomas
CHEERFUL PARIS • QUOTES ABOUT PARIS
“Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.”
-Michael Simkins
“To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.”
-Pierre-Auguste Renoir
“Even the pigeons are dancing, kissing, going in circles, mounting each other. Paris is the city of love,
even for the birds.”
-Samantha Schutz
LOVE TO LIVE.
“Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway station—the Gare D’Orsay—and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments:
the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees—nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?”
-Margaret Anderson
PARISIANS • QUOTES ABOUT PARIS
“Just imagine! In the early nineteenth century, this cathedral was in such a state of disrepair that the city considered tearing it down. Luckily for us, Victor Hugo heard about the plans to destroy it and wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to raise awareness of its glorious history.
And, by golly, did it work! Parisians campaigned to save it, and the building was repaired and polished to the pristine state you find today.”
-Stephanie Perkins
“For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her.”
-Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
SELF-RESPECT
“In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren’t enough euros to go around. “The entire EU is short on coins.”
And I say, “Really?” because there are plenty of them in Germany. I’m never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy.
PARIS AND TOKYO
Here in Tokyo they’re not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don’t mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street.
These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like “We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.”
-David Sedaris
“To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”
-Victor Hugo
“London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.”
-G. K. Chesterson
“Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?”
-Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
“Paris was all so… Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all – the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French!”
-David Nicholls
PARIS IS A HEAVEN
“Paris is a heaven for all woman’s obssesions: hot men, great chocolates, scrumptuous pastries, sexy lingerie, cool clothes but, as any shoe-o-phile knows, this city is a hotbed of fabulous shoes.”
-Kirsten Lobe
“In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success.”
-Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
“A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life…”
-Thomas Jefferson
PARIS OF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST
“Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries;
pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent’s skin;
define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings;
throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist;
or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark’s jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.”
-Victor Hugo
THE MECCA OF THE WORLD
“Though you may leave Paris, Paris never really leaves you.”
-Janice Macleod
“For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’s daughter.”
-Alan Jay Lerner
“After living in Paris, does not the rest of the world seem but a hovel?”
-Pietros Maneos
