300+ Inspiring Quotes about Paris & Sayings That You’ll Love

Famous Quotes About Paris

  • “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” —Gertrude Stein
  • “Paris is not a city; it’s a world.” —King Francis I
  • “I like The Eiffel Tower because it looks like steel and lace.” —Natalie Lloyd
  • “The chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulant.” —T.S. Eliot
  • “Paris is the most beautiful city in the world. It brings tears to your eyes.” —Lee Radziwill“Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.” —John Berger
  • “When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.” —Henry Miller
  • “In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.” —Mark Twain
  • “…the whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music…it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.” —James Thurber
  • “I had forgotten how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city is, there’s a stillness to it, a peace that lures you in. In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.” —Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
  • “It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist’s studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.” —Julian Barnes

Inspiring Quotes about Paris

  • “We’ll always have Paris.” —Howard Koch
  • “Secrets travel fast in Paris.” —Napoleon Bonaparte
  • “Paris is always a good idea.” —Audrey Hepburn
  • “When good Americans die, they go to Paris.” —Oscar Wilde
  • “To know Paris is to know a great deal.” —Henry Miller
  • “London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” —G. K. Chesterson
  • “An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.” —Honoré de Balzac
  • “A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.” —Thomas Jefferson
  • “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
  • “You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights. I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.” —Owen Wilson

Funny Quotes about Paris

  • “To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.” —Victor Hugo
  • “When Paris sneezes, Europe catches a cold.” —Austrian statesman Prince Metternich.
  • “Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.” —Charles de Montesquieu
  • “The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.” —Fred Allen
  • “The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.” —Jean Cocteau
  • “When good Americans die, they go to Paris.” —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
  • “In Paris, you’re as far as possible from the land of pleasant smiles.” —Kanye West
  • “Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.” —Norman Schwartzkopf
  • “The objects of which Paris folks are fond– literature, art, medicine and adultery.” —Mark Twain
  • “We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it.” —Marge Simpson
  • “I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.” —Josephine Baker
  • “Paris is a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four fifths of the inhabitants die of grief.” —Nicolas Chamfort
  • “The last time the French asked for ‘more proof,’ it came marching into Paris under a German flag.” —David Letterman
  • “Cities have sex: London is a man, Paris is a woman, and New York City a well-adjusted transsexual.” —Angela Carter
  • “The only time France wants us to go to war is when the German Army is sitting in Paris sipping coffee.” —Regis Philbin
  • “Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.” —Carlos Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind
  • “Even the pigeons are dancing, kissing, going in circles, and mounting each other. Paris is the city of love, even for the birds —Samantha Schutz
  • “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
  • “France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. France has usually been governed by prostitutes.” —Mark Twain
  • “If Sex and the City taught us anything, it’s that Paris is the only city in the world that New Yorkers actually fantasize about.” —Elizabeth Bard
  • “If I weren’t acting, I would own my own chocolate shop in Paris. I would be a nice, overweight person that makes chocolate all day long.” —Emma Bell
  • “Another well-known Paris landmark is the Arc de Triomphe, a moving monument to the many brave women and men who have died trying to visit it.” —Dave Barry
  • “In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.” —Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad.
  • “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
  • “Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.” —Henry Miller
  • “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

Catchy Quotes about Paris

  • “Breathe Paris in. It nourishes the soul.” —Victor Hugo
  • “In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.” —Gaston Leroux
  • “London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” —G.K. Chesterson
  • “America is my country, and Paris is my hometown.” —Gertrude Stein
  • “Just add three letters to Paris, and you have paradise.” —Jules Renard
  • “To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!” —Victor Hugo
  • “In Paris, I really do like to try and do nothing… but that’s impossible.” —Christian Louboutin
  • “In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.” —Jean Cocteau
  • “You stumble, you soar. And if you’re lucky, you make it to Paris for a while.” —Amy Howard
  • “It’s true, you never forget your first love, and for me, that will always be Paris.” —Caitriona Balfe
  • “When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.” —Henry Miller
  • “Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.” —Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  • “Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.” —Paula McLain
  • “Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, and expunge the dead weight of our past.” —Michael Simkin
  • “There should be a name for the syndrome that occurs when you’re in Paris and you already miss it.” —Rosecrans Baldwin
  • “That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me.” —Midnight in Paris
  • “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
  • “If ‘Sex and the City’ taught us anything, it’s that Paris is the only city in the world that New Yorkers actually fantasize about.” —Elizabeth Bard
  • “There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once.” —James Joyce
  • “You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.” —Allen Ginsberg
  • “Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I’ve never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.” —Wes Anderson
  • “The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature, and Music… it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.” —James Thurber
  • “A final reminder. Whenever you are in Paris at twilight in the early summer, return to the Seine and watch the evening sky close slowly on a last strand of daylight fading quietly, like a sigh.” —Kate Simon
  • “I had forgotten how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city is, there’s a stillness to it, a peace that lures you in. In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.” —Kristin Hannah
  • “I think Paris smells, and not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She’s a city for all the senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and yes, for mysteries.” —M.J. Rose
  • “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
  • “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

Cute Quotes about Paris

  • “Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.” —Jeffrey Eugenides
  • “A breath of Paris preserves the soul.” —Victor Hugo
  • “To study in Paris is to be born in Paris.” —Victor Hugo
  • “An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.” —Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
  • “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” —American writer Gertrude Stein
  • “Just add three letters to Paris, and you have paradise.” —Jules Renard, French author
  • “April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom, holiday tables under the trees.” —E. Y. Harburg
  • “In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.” —Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
  • “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.” —Gustavo Flaubert, Madame Bovary.
  • “My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  • “Of all the places that I have seen in Europe, Paris is the most fascinating.” —Washington Irving
  • “Paris at night is a street show of a hundred moments you might have lived.” —Courtney Maum
  • “I can never decide whether Paris is more beautiful by day or by night.” —Adriana, Midnight in Paris.
  • “To be a Parisian is not about being born in Paris, it is about being reborn there.” —Sacha Guitry
  • “You don’t go to Notre Dame to learn something; you go to Notre Dame to be somebody.” —Lou Holtz
  • “The shopping, the food, the views! Paris is a city that entrances us all—and I’m no exception.” —Michael Kors
  • “What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world.” —Charles Dickens
  • “Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, and expunge the dead weight of our past.” —Michael Simkins
  • “Paris has always seemed … the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.” —Natalie Clifford Barney
  • “I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It’s an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.” —Alan Furst
  • “If you have ever walked in Paris, you will see that Paris will ever walk in your memories.” —Mehmet Murat ildan
  • “It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.” —James Baldwin
  • “Paris is the only place where I feel that I lead a life that I can call my own.” —Joan Juliet Buck
  • “Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilization. It’s where it all began and ended.” —Alan Furst
  • “Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit.” —Natalie Clifford Barney
  • “Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.” —Paula McLain, The Paris Wife.
  • “Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I’ve never been down before is like going to a movie.” —Wes Anderson
  • “Paris at dawn is one of those rare cities where you get the impression that something worthwhile could actually happen to you.” —Pierre Assouline, The Light of Paris.
  • “That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me.” —Marion Cotillard as Adriana in Midnight in Paris
  • “Paris… is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.” —Edmund White in The Flaneur.
  • “Jerry: Paris? No, not this city. It’s too real and too beautiful. It never lets you forget anything. It reaches in and opens you wide, and you stay that way.” —An American In Paris
  • “The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music… it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.” —James Thurber, in a letter to a friend.
  • “I had forgotten how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city is, there’s a stillness to it, a peace that lures you in. In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.” —Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale.
  • “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
  • “To avoid sounding like a cliche, I won’t say I want to get proposed to in Paris, but Paris. I want it to happen somewhere public where people can be excited that I just got proposed to, and everyone applauds, like in a restaurant – that, or somewhere totally secluded… in Paris.” —Betty Who

Love Quotes about Paris

  • “I fly to Paris and discover how to make love to God.” —Ann Voskamp
  • “It’s midnight. One half of Paris is making love to the other half.” —Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka.
  • “Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.” —Ernest Hemingway
  • “There’s something about Paris, people just don’t have anything else to do there but love each other.” —Louis Garrel
  • “This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  • “You’ll have to fall in love at least once in your life, or Paris has failed to rub off on you.” —A. Bucchianeri
  • “Even the pigeons are dancing, kissing, going in circles, and mounting each other. Paris is the city of love, even for the birds.” —Samantha Schutz
  • “We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth … I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do.” —Simone de Beauvoir
  • “I always thought falling in love was hard, but now I realize that was the easy bit. It’s staying in love that‘s the hard part.” —Alexandra Potter
  • “I love Paris tenderly and am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.― Michel de Montaigne
  • “Paris is the destination for brokenhearted American women. I think men go there and have their hearts broken, but women come there with their hearts broken.” —Whit Stillman
  • “I’m not a complicated girl; she laughed, I just want to run away with you, rob a bank, fall in love and eat ice creams in Paris.” —Michael Faudet
  • “Born and raised in Paris, I am deeply attached to my city; we almost have half a century of love story together, where I have been truly completely faithful! The most beautiful city in the world is my city, yeepeeee.” —Christian Louboutin
  • “Paris is the City of Light, of love, of beauty, of romance and of hope over fear, gratitude over cynicism and light over darkness. The light must, has before and will always prevail…. I stand with the City of Light now and forever.” —Doni Belau, Girls’ Guide to Paris.
  • “Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.” —John Berger
  • “I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood… I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.” —Michel de Montaigne

Romantic Quotes about Paris

  • “We’ll always have Paris.” —Howard Koch
  • “Paris is always a good idea.” —Audrey Hepburn
  • “I love Paris when it sizzles.” —Cole Porter
  • “Good talkers are only found in Paris.” —Francois Villon
  • “When good Americans die, they go to Paris.” —Oscar Wilde
  • “In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.” —Gaston Leroux
  • “To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.” —Victor Hugo
  • “To know Paris is to know a great deal.” —Henry Miller
  • “London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” —G. K. Chesterson
  • “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” —Gertrude Stein
  • “Just add three letters to Paris, and you have paradise.” —Jules Renard
  • “An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.” —Honoré de Balzac
  • “In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.” —Jean Cocteau
  • “The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life.” —Thomas Jefferson
  • “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

Dreaming about Paris Quotes

  • “At last I have come into a dreamland.” —Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • “Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember.” —Djuna Barnes
  • “I love Milan because it’s my home town. But Paris is the dream city: even when you’re stressed out in shows, you look around, and everything is so beautiful.” —Bianca Balti
  • “Paris… is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreams, to those capable of amusing themselves in its streets without regard to time when urged business requires their presence elsewhere.” —Julien Green.
  • “I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She’s a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and, yes, for mysteries.” —M. J. Rose

Short Quotes about Paris

  • “Paris, I louvre you.”
  • “Eiffel hard for this city.”
  • “Paris is a city of dreams.”
  • “Paris ain’t much of a town.” —Babe Ruth
  • “Paris, France is exciting and peaceful.” ―Gertrude Stein
  • “Paris was the cross-roads of the world.” —Lesley Blanch
  • “Secrets travel fast in Paris.” —French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
  • “La belle, la brave, la raw, la rainy.” —Dorothy Parker
  • “It’s Paris. You don’t come here for the weather.” —Adrian Leeds
  • “Good talkers are only found in Paris.” —French poet Francois Villon
  • “With an apple I will astonish Paris.” —French artist Paul Cézanne
  • “Paris is always a good idea.” —Audrey Hepburn as Sabrina Fairchild in Sabrina.
  • “If you’re going to be sad, you might as well be sad in Paris
  • “Let’s go to Paris. Take me there and never look back.” —Lana Del Rey
  • “I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles.” —Composer and songwriter Cole Porter
  • “A bad day in Paris is still better than a good day in anywhere else.”
  • “Sorry for what I said when I wasn’t eating a crêpe by the Eiffel Tower.
  • “Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and lust of the eyes.” —Henry James

Quotes About Paris Eiffel Tower

  • “I like The Eiffel Tower because it looks like steel and lace.” —Natalie Lloyd.
  • “Every time I look at the Eiffel Tower, it completely blows my mind.” —Brian Fallon
  • “The Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower. They’re monumental. They’re straight out of Page 52 in your school history book.” —Billy Crystal
  • “I should go to Paris and jump off of the Eiffel Tower. If I took the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier.” —Woody Allen, Everyone Says I Love You.
  • “I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.” —Bill Bryson
  • “The Eiffel Tower is nine hundred eighty-four feet high. On a clear day, you can see eighty-five miles from the top. It has three elevators. Each elevator can carry sixty-three people. It cost about one million dollars to build Eiffel Tower.” —Suzy Kline
  • “You show up in Paris, and on the drive from the airport to the hotel you’re like, ‘This is so cool! I want to see something! I want to go to the Eiffel Tower!’ And then you leave the next morning. You think, Oh, I didn’t get to do anything. I tell people: I’ve been just about everywhere, but I’ve seen nothing.” —Taylor Lautner

Notre Dame Paris Quotes

  • “After Notre Dame, what is there?” —Ara Parseghisan
  • “Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.” —R.I. Stevenson
  • “God has a plan for everybody’s life, so there was obviously a reason why He wanted me to go to Notre Dame. Everything happens for a reason.” —Justin Tuck
  • “I feel comfortable singing in the great cathedrals of the world because I spent so much time as a child singing in church. And it isn’t very different. Of course, nothing looks quite like Notre Dame de Paris.” —Jessye Norman
  • “Walking at random through the streets, we came by chance upon the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I shall long remember my first impression of the scene within. The lofty gothic ceiling arched far above my head and through the stained windows the light came but dimly – it was all still, solemn and religious.” —Bayard Taylor

Quotes about the Louvre in Paris

  • “It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.” —Pierre-Augustine Renoir
  • “I remember being a student, and I would go every Friday to the Louvre and stay for ages, just walking around.” —Jemima West
  • “I’ve been fortunate to have been in Paris a dozen times, where I’ve gone to the Louvre. I’m very big on Impressionistic paintings.” —Shawn Crahan
  • “You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa.” —Dave Barry
  • “The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature — Paul Cezanne
  • “The Louvre for me is a wonderful experience. Because it continues; it didn’t get cut off. It was actually a continuous involvement all the way, and a lot of people have come and gone, come and gone; but I’m still here.” —I.M. Pei
  • “I’ve been lucky enough to win an Oscar, write a best-seller – my other dream would be to have a painting in the Louvre. The only way that’s going to happen is if I paint a dirty one on the wall of the gentlemen’s lavatory.” —David Niven
  • “There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.” —Jim Crace
  • “I went to the Louvre in Paris, and I saw all the paintings and the Mona Lisa. You don’t really see something like that every day. I was looking at it, and everything else in the room just shut out. Like, Leonardo Da Vinci painted this thing – this is unreal that he touched that. It had this crazy effect on me.” —Brian Fallon
  • “I know my little ‘dirty drawings’ are never going to hang in the main salons of the Louvre, but it would be nice if – I would like to say ‘when,’ but I better say ‘if’ – our world learns to accept all the different ways of loving. Then maybe I could have a place in one of the smaller side rooms.” —Tom of Finland
  • “The Louvre! The Louvre has me in its clutches. Every time I’m there rich blessings rain down upon me. I am coming to understand Titian more and more and learning to love him. And then there is Botticelli’s sweet Madonna, with red roses behind her, standing against a blue-green sky. And Fiesole with his poignant little biblical stories, so simply told, often so glorious in their colors.” —Paula Modersohn-Becker
  • “The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our mids from them, and let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments. Time and reflection, moreover, little by little modify our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.” —Paul Cezanne
  • “What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs? They are like me; through the years, we’ve seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.” —Abbas Kiarostami

Quotes about Paris and France

  • “Paris can be like the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You can’t leave.” —Edmund White
  • “Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.” —French novelist Honoré de Balzac
  • “Paris is a wonderful city. I can’t say I belong to an especially Anglophone community.” —Marilyn Hacker
  • “Paris is the happiest city in the world tonight. All Paris is dancing in the streets.” —Larry LeSueur
  • “When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.” —American writer Henry Miller
  • “Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness —Willa Cather
  • “The Côte d’Azur is the greenhouse where the roots grow. Paris is the shop where the flowers are sold.” —French writer Jean Cocteau
  • “No one has the right to change Paris, the protesters say, and argue that the city is the patrimony of all mankind.” —John Vinocur
  • “The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay, I heard the laughter of her heart in every street café.” —Oscar Hammerstein II
  • “Everything ends this way in France – everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs – everything is a pretext for a good dinner.” —Jean Anouilh
  • “Paris is a city where even the most outrageous story of incest and murder is greeted with a verbal shrug: ‘Mais c’est normal.’” – Edmund White
  • “Paris is where my family are, but it’s not really home now because I have dear friends in London and dear friends in New York.” —Clemence Poesy
  • “But coming [to Paris] has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am.” —Augustus Saint-Gaudens
  • “There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once.” —Irish poet James Joyce
  • “The bohemian life that reigned in Paris until the end of the ’50s is gone. The artists had more time to think, to reflect; success didn’t come so suddenly.” —Pontus Hulten
  • “It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians.” —Muriel Spark.
  • “The tranquil majesty of the architectural lines, the wonderful blurred winter lights, the long lines of lamps garlanding the avenues & the quays—je l’ai dans mon sang [I have it in my blood].” —Edith Wharton
  • “Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall my buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world to be wonderful and youthful after all.” —American poet T.S. Eliot
  • “Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.” —Marguerite Duras
  • “The chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulant and like most stimulants incites to rushing about and produces a pleasant illusion of great mental activity rather than the solid results of hard work. —T.S. Eliot
  • “…the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one’s life here exactly as one pleases…there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.” —Henry James, in a letter to a friend.
  • “At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful and because it was so useless.” —Simone de Beauvoir
  • “I think that taking night trains or meeting someone on the road is pretty romantic. I’ve done a couple of things like that. I’ve surprised someone in Paris. And hopefully, when you surprise someone, they’re happy to see you.” —John Cusack
  • “I’d sometimes go to Paris by myself – it was an easy two-hour train ride – to get a break from the everyday grind, to walk around a big city, ride a subway, feel the energy of a world capital.” —Chris Pavone
  • “One of the first drawings I did in Paris – I wasn’t thinking of doing drawings, but somehow or other, I kept drawing – I bought a hyacinth flower with a lot of leaves, just to make me feel like spring.” —Ellsworth Kelly
  • “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
  • “I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city… It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.” —Katherine Mansfield in a letter to a friend.
  • “I can never tire of speaking of the bridges of Paris. By day and by night have I paused on them to gaze at their views; the word not being too comprehensive for the crowds and groupings of objects that are visible from their arches.” —James Fenimore Cooper
  • “The national characteristics… the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.” —Lawrence Durrell
  • “Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.” —Marie Curie
  • “She’s one of those third year girls who gripe my liver… You know, American college kids. They come over here to take their third year and lap up a little culture… They’re officious and dull. They’re always making profound observations they’ve overheard.” —Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan in An American In Paris
  • “Every traveler knows too well the endless quest for the perfect travel bag: the one that’s stylish enough to carry through Paris, sturdy enough to tote around Peru, and – most important – doesn’t make your shoulder sag even before you’ve loaded it up with everything you need for a day of sightseeing.” —Hanya Yanagihara
  • “Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.” —Milan Kundera
  • “People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society. 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
  • “One gets a good look at one’s country from this perspective, and one learns to see one’s nation with double eyes, to feel what we have got and what we have not got. I’ve learned more about America in one month in Paris than I could in one year in New York. Looking at this country makes all the unimportant phases of the American problem fade somewhat and render the true problem more vivid.― Richard Wright
  • “I like Paris because I find something here, something of integrity, which I seem to have strangely lost in my own country. It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of ‘thou shalt not.’ I am colored, and wish to be known as colored, but sometimes I feel that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country. And so–but only temporarily–I have fled from it.” —Jessie Fauset

Victor Hugo Quotes About Paris

  • “To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.” —Victor Hugo
  • “Breathe Paris in. It nourishes the soul.” —Victor Hugo
  • “To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!” —Victor Hugo
  • “A breath of Paris preserves the soul.” —Victor Hugo
  • “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

Hemingway Quotes About Paris

  • “There are only two places in the world where we can live happy—at home and in Paris.” —Ernest Hemingway
  • “Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.” —Ernest Hemingway
  • “I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.” —Hemingway, from private papers in the collection of the John F. Kennedy Library.
  • “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
  • “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
  • “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
  • “There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. Paris was always worth it, and you received return for whatever you brought to it.” —Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast.
  • “To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.” —Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast

Quotes About Paris For Instagram

  • “We’ll always have Paris.” —Humphrey Bogart
  • “London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” —G.K. Chesterton
  • “The Eiffel Tower was once thought impossible to build.” —Hector Jesus Arencibia
  • “If you’re going to be sad, you might as well be sad in Paris.” —Gossip Girl
  • “The shopping, the food, the views! Paris is a city that entrances us all – and I’m no exception.” —Michael Kors
  • “That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me.” —Marion Cotillard
  • “If “Sex and the City” taught us anything, it’s that Paris is the only city in the world that New Yorkers actually fantasize about.” —Elizabeth Bard
  • “I should go to Paris and jump off of the Eiffel Tower. If I took the Concorde, I could be in my next life three hours earlier.” —Woody Allen
  • “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

Instagram Captions for Paris

  • “Je t‘aime, Paris.”
  • “Pardon my French.”
  • “Take me back to Paris.”
  • “There is no cure for Paris.”
  • “Paris, you had me at Bonjour.”
  • “Paris is calling and I must go.”
  • “I couldn’t come to Paris without my French coat.”
  • “I visited the Louvre, but I didn’t like it – Mona Lisa was framed.”
  • “I heard DaVinci and Michelangelo got into an argument, but it ended with a draw.”