74 Inspiring Paris Quotes

Oct. 7, 2024, 1:45 a.m.

74 Inspiring Paris Quotes

Paris, often referred to as the "City of Light," has long been a beacon of inspiration for dreamers, artists, and wanderers from all over the world. Its enchanting streets, rich history, and captivating culture create a unique tapestry that inspires countless visitors and locals alike. Whether it's the awe-inspiring architecture, the vibrant café culture, or the romantic ambiance that permeates the air, Paris never fails to stir the soul. In this collection, we've gathered 74 of the most inspiring quotes that capture the essence and allure of this iconic city, offering a glimpse into the magic that continues to draw people to its heart.

1. “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

2. “But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.” - Ernest Hemingway

3. “When good Americans die, they go to Paris'.'Where do bad Americans go?''They stay in America'.” - Oscar Wilde

4. “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. 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

5. “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

6. “A cidade, efectivamente, sorri apenas àqueles que se aproximam dela e que deambulam pelas suas ruas; a esses, ela fala numa linguagem tranquilizadora e familiar, mas a alma de Paris só se revela de longe e do alto, e é no silêncio do céu que se escuta o imenso grito patético de orgulho e de fé que ela eleva na direcção das nuvens.” - Julien Green

7. “...quando me passeio por Passy parece-me que deambulo por dentro de mim mesmo e que tropeço incessantemente na minha infância.” - Julien Green

8. “A alma de uma grande cidade não se deixa apreender facilmente; é preciso, para se comunicar com ela, termo-nos aborrecido, termos de algum modo sofrido nos lugares que a circunscrevem.” - Julien Green

9. “Bom ou mau, aquilo que sai da Paris é Paris, seja uma carta, um pedaço de pão, um par de sapatos ou um poema.” - Julien Green

10. “Even the pigeons are dancing, kissing,going in circles, mounting each other.Paris is the city of love,even for the birds.” - Samantha Schutz

11. “Goddammit! How does the world keep spinning with women on the planet?"Ian St. John in THE POMPEII SCROLL” - Jacqueline LaTourrette

12. “I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.” - Ernest Hemingway

13. “Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu—actually of the prices not the courses—outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).” - Christopher Hitchens

14. “We'll always have Paris.” - Howard Koch

15. “I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space. ” - Guy de Maupassant

16. “Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s'étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuveSur Paris dormant ruisselait.” - Charles Baudelaire

17. “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

18. “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. 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

19. “Hope is a most beautiful drug.” - Jeremy Mercer

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

21. “Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.” - Roman Payne

22. “Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.” - Jennifer Donnelly

23. “Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?” - Jennifer Donnelly

24. “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

25. “The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.” - Stephen Fry

26. “We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner.” - Marcel Proust

27. “You're going to have to settle on one eventually. Why not save us both the hassle, close your eyes and point. Whoever you're pointing at will be our winner." "I've played that game once before. Ended up--" Paris shuddered. "Never mind. It's not good to wander down that particular memory trail. So no. Just no.” - Gena Showalter

28. “Sienna, meet Zacharel. He's a warrior angel for the One, True Deity. Zacharel, meet Sienna. She's mine.” - Gena Showalter

29. “Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.” - Michael Simkins

30. “Fairy tales only happen in movies." -George Meliesfrom The Invention of Hugo Cabret” - Brian Selznick

31. “I wish I could go to Paris right now.” - Emily J. Proctor

32. “For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.” - Ernest Hemingway

33. “By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.” - Guy de Maupassant

34. “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

35. “A breath of laughter will blow a Government out of existence in Paris much more effectually than a whiff of cannon-smoke” - Robert Barr

36. “Study is the child of silence and mystery.” - Henri Murger

37. “When Hitler marched across the RhineTo take the land of France,La dame de fer decided,‘Let’s make the tyrant dance.’Let him take the land and city,The hills and every flower,One thing he will never have,The elegant Eiffel Tower.The French cut the cables,The elevators stood still,‘If he wants to reach the top,Let him walk it, if he will.’The invaders hung a swastikaThe largest ever seen.But a fresh breeze blewAnd away it flew,Never more to be seen.They hung up a second mark,Smaller than the first,But a patriot climbedWith a thought in mind:‘Never your duty shirk.’Up the iron ladyHe stealthily made his way,Hanging the bright tricolour,He heroically saved the day.Then, for some strange reason,A mystery to this day,Hitler never climbed the tower,On the ground he had to stay.At last he ordered she be razedDown to a twisted pile.A futile attack, for still she standsBeaming her metallic smile.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

38. “Retrouver Paris! savez-vous ce que c'est, ô Parisiens?” - Honoré de Balzac

39. “... you’ll have to fall in love at least once in your life, or Paris has failed to rub off on you.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

40. “Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.” - Christopher Hitchens

41. “London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” - G. K. Chesterson

42. “The directness of her question throws me. "I don't know. Sometimes I think there are only so many opportunities...to get together with someone. And we've both screwed up so many times"- my voice grows quiet - "that we've missed our chance.""Anna." Mer pauses. "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.""But—""But what? You love him, and he loves you, and you live in the most romantic city in the world.” - Stephanie Perkins

43. “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

44. “I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do.But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")” - William S. Wilson

45. “When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for—distilling places and people and objects to their essential qualities.” - Paula Mclain

46. “In Paris, you couldn’t really turn around without seeing the result of lovers’ bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.” - Paula Mclain

47. “And you say Paris is gay, but it has its down times. You say go in the spring and not the summer, because watching the autumn creep through the Rive Gauche preparing for winter is hard.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

48. “...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...” - Ann Patchett

49. “FAITES L'AMOUR ET RECOMMENCEZ (make love and make it again)” - Anouk Markovits

50. “The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.” - Malcolm Cowley

51. “To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!” - Victor Hugo

52. “She murmured, “I love the imagery of Sappho, the warm summer air across the velvety darkness, the lover between love’s thighs.” She stayed quiet a moment. “But it takes a man’s kiss to put the fire to the metaphor.” - Paul A. Myers

53. “Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another woman sitting over in a wing chair, a pleasantly attractive lady wearing the tasteful clothes of a senior redactrice, or senior civil servant, the stylish black skirt, the dark stockings, the black pumps, and the starched white linen blouse of her caste. The dark hair was swept up in a chignon, elegant and functional, dark eyes glistened as she smiled at him in a professional manner. He could see that she was a woman who met men in a highly assured way—serene, and expert at creating a proper distance.” - Paul A. Myers

54. “The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.” - Émile Zola

55. “Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged.” - Henry James

56. “You'd think the sight of beautiful Place Vendôme would lift my spirits but oddly the arc of jewellery - so obviously beyond the means of a jobless person like me - only depresses me more. I plod on feeling confused, guilty even, that I should feel unhappy in a place that looks like paradise.” - Sarah Turnbull

57. “Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowd As herds of bellowing buses drive by Love's anguish tightens your throat As if you were never to be loved again If you lived in the old days you would enter a monasteryYou are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayerYou make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter crackles The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your lifeIt's a painting hanging in a dark museumAnd sometimes you go and look at it close up” - Guillaume Apollinaire

58. “Oh Paris From red to green all the yellow dies away Paris Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the AntillesThe window opens like an orange The beautiful fruit of light("Windows")” - Guillaume Apollinaire

59. “Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.” - James Baldwin

60. “...but you drank your black coffee by choice, believeng that Paris was sufficient alcohol.” - Malcolm Cowley

61. “Time wastes too fast… the days and hours of it… are flying over our heads like little clouds on a windy day, never to return more – everything presses on – whilst thou art twisting the lock, - see! it grows grey… and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!” - The Life And Opinions of Tristram Shandy

62. “If you have ever walked in Paris, you will see that Paris will ever walk in your memoires!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

63. “Eğer Paris’te hiç yürüdüysen, göreceksin ki Paris daima senin anılarında yürüyecektir!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

64. “They stamped their own pattern of lovers onto the fabric of Paris.” - Emma Calin

65. “For example, in Paris, if one desires to buy something, you enter the store and say "Good morning, sir" or "madam," depending on what is appropriate, you wait until you are greeted, you make polite chitchat about the weather or some such, and when the salesperson asks what they can do for you, then and only then do you bring up the vulgar business of the transaction you require.” - Craig Ferguson

66. “Paris and Fashion. Books and Art. What would one be ... without the other?” - Peggy Kopman-Owens

67. “... Paris was a city of love for unimaginative folks.” - Lauren Morrill

68. “I know the consequences, Manon,” Ilyse conceded. “I know the fate you endured might one day be my own. But I refuse to be a prisoner for the rest of my life.” - Melika Dannese Lux

69. “In Paris, women were not considered interesting until they were middle-aged. The Mist of Montmartre” - Peggy Kopman-Owens

70. “Hélène, her eyes once more raised and remote, was deep in a dream. She was Lady Rowena, she was in love, with the deep peaceful passion of a noble soul. This spring morning, the loveliness of the great city, the first wallflowers scenting her lap, had little by little melted her heart.” - Émile Zola

71. “The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity.” - Émile Zola

72. “It is impossible for a Parisian to resist the desire to flick through the old volumes laid out by a bookseller.[Il est impossible, pour un Parisien, de résister au désir de feuilleter de vieux ouvrages étalés par un bouquiniste.]” - Gerard de Nerval

73. “The veneer of civilization fell away to reveal desperate animals, humanity at their worst.” - Travis Luedke

74. “[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors!” - Tom Wolfe