There is but one Paris

Famous Quotes about the City of Lights

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
Jean Cocteau

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

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

When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.
Henry Miller

What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!
Charles Dickens

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.
Gertrude Stein

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

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

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

It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator.
Henry Miller

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

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

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

A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.
Thomas Jefferson

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

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

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

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
Friedrich Nietzsche

To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.
Victor Hugo

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

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

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

Photos: Andrew Burlone