“The French have the perfect word for it: ‘ flâneur’.It means to strol around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flâneur as ‘a person who walks the city in order to experience it’.As Plum would say, I’m flâneuring like a motherfucker.”

“There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.”

“The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.”

“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.”

“For the introvert, as for the flâneur, observing is not a fallback position—something we do because we can’t participate. We watch because we want to. There is something wonderfully grounding about remaining still as others mull about—or mulling about while others remain still. Against the backdrop of the scene, the introvert feels more like an “I.”

“The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19)”