85 Perfect Paris Quotes That Will Have You Dreaming of Paris

“Paris. … There you can be whatever you want to be. Totally yourself.”

Langston Hughes

“If you’re going to be sad, you might as well be sad in Paris.”

Blair Waldorf, Gossip Girl

“I fly to Paris and discover how to make love to God.”

Ann Voskamp

“Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”

Ernest Hemingway

“Paris is the only place where I feel that I lead a life that I can call my own.”

Joan Juliet Buck

“Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.”

Willa Cather

“I love Paris when it sizzles.”

Cole Porter

“To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Paris is always a good idea.”

Audrey Hepburn

“Just add three letters to Paris, and you have paradise.”

Jules Renard

“America is my country, and Paris is my hometown.”

Gertrude Stein

“To know Paris is to know a great deal.”

Henry Miller

“In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.”

Gaston Leroux

“Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit.”

Natalie Clifford Barney

“Paris is not a city; it’s a world.”

King Francis I

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris.”

Oscar Wilde

“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”

Victor Hugo

“In Paris, I really do like to try and do nothing… but that’s impossible.”

Christian Louboutin

“You stumble, you soar. And if you’re lucky, you make it to Paris for a while.”

Amy Howard

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

Jean Cocteau

“Secrets travel fast in Paris.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

“That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me.”

Midnight In Paris

“I like The Eiffel Tower because it looks like steel and lace.”

Natalie Lloyd

“An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

 “Breathe Paris in. It nourishes the soul.”

Victor Hugo

“The shopping, the food, the views! Paris is a city that entrances us all—and I’m no exception.”

Michael Kors

“Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.”

Honoré de Balzac

‘The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay, I heard the laughter of her heart in every street cafe.”

Oscar Hammerstein II

“It’s true, you never forget your first love, and for me, that will always be Paris.”

Caitriona Balfe

“The French and their food. They put each meal on a pedestal.”

Giada De Laurentiis

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

Charles Dickens

“A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life.”

Thomas Jefferson

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Paris is the happiest city in the world tonight. All Paris is dancing in the streets.”

Larry LeSueur

“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

“At five o’clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air.”

Anaïs Nin

“Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.”

G.K. Chesterson

“Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.”

Paula McLain

“There should be a name for the syndrome that occurs when you’re in Paris and you already miss it.”

Rosecrans Baldwin

“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”

Ernest Hemingway

“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, Everyone Says I Love You

“Cities have gender: London is a man, Paris is a woman, and New York City a well-adjusted transsexual.”

Angela Carter

“I ought to be jealous of the tower. She is more famous than I am.”

Gustave Eiffel

“Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

John Berger

“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

“Let’s go to Paris. Take me there and never look back.”

Lana Del Rey

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

Samantha Schutz

“I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It’s an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.”

Alan Furst

“That was the moment I fell in love with Paris and the moment that I felt that Paris had fallen in love with me.”

paris, je t’aime

“We’ll always have Paris.”

Howard Koch (Casablanca)

“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 (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly)

“It’s midnight. One half of Paris is making love to the other half.“

Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchk

“Paris holds the key to your heart.”

Anastasia

“Je taime.”

Unknown

“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

“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.

“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

“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

It is perfectly possible to be enamored of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.”

James Baldwin

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 suddenly discovered that cooking was a rich and layered and endlessly fascinating subject. The best way to describe it is to say that I fell in love with French food- the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals.”

Julia Child

“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

“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

“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

“In Paris, they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

“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 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

“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 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

“Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness, because I felt alive. Yes, alive. That was the moment I fell in love with Paris. And I felt Paris fall in love with me.”

Paris Je T’Aime

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“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