86+ Inspirational Quotes about Paris

Indulge your love of Paris with these inspirational quotes about Paris. Paris is my happy place. I have been living here for nearly 20 years and these quotes make me smile. Whether I’m having a picnic in Paris or sitting in a favorite cafe, I just love every moment here. I’ve often been asked why I’ve decided to stay in Paris so long and I think Henry Miller’s quote about Paris sums it up best. “An American writer who had come to visit France… asked quite naturally what is was that had kept me here so long… It was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a stroll through the streets.”

statue in the Tuileries - quotes about Paris

I have loved Paris for as long as I can remember, even before I ever visited! I even told me mom that I would absolutely move here one day when I was just 4 years old! After nearly 20 years living here, it’s still my favorite place in the world. These quotes about Paris will inspire you to come and visit and live your Parisian dream too.

“Paris is a divine secret of eternity.” – E.E. Cummings

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

3. “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” – Getrude Stein (I feel this way too and this is one of my favorite quotes about Paris!)

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

5. “Breathe Paris in, it nourishes the soul.” – Victor Hugo

6. “When Spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.” – Henry Miller

7. “I love Paris when it sizzles.” – Cole Porter

8. “The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

9. “Having lived in Paris unfits you for living anywhere, including Paris.” – John Ashbery

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

11. “To study in Paris is to be born in Paris.” – Victor Hugo

12. “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

13. “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, A Moveable Feast

14. “At last I have come into a dreamland.” – Harriet Teacher Stowe

15. “It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris.” – Henry Miller

16. “It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.” – James Baldwin

17. “Paris is always a good idea.” – Audrey Hepburn

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Perhaps Paris is the one city left where the tyranny of Paris fashions still holds women in its thrall.” – Edmund White, The Flâneur

21. “You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever going to come up with a book, a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t.

22. “Line cutting in Paris is rampant. So much so, that there’s a word for it : resquillage or ‘taking a risk’. And believe me, anyone who has the temerity to slide in front of me is definitely taking a risk.” – David Lebovitz, The Sweet Life in Paris

23. “Paris – there you can be whatever you want to be. Totally yourself.” – Langston Hughes

24. “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, Midnight in Paris

25. “In Paris, I’ve never felt a moment of sorrow.” – Richard Wright

26. “When good Americans die, they go to Paris.” – Oscar Wilde

27. “Secrets travel fast in Paris.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

28. “The best of America drifts to Paris.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. “Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and lust of the eyes.” – Henry James

30. “An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

31. “I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life.” – Sherwood Anderson

32. “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

33. “Paris is not a city; it’s a world.” – King Francis I

34. “She wanted to pass, but she also wanted to live in Paris.” – Gustave Flaubert

35. “To know Paris is to know a great deal.” – Henry Miller

36. “We’ll always have Paris.” – Howard Koch, Casablanca

37. “I like the Eiffel Tower because it looks like steel and lace.” – Natalie Lloyd

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

39. “In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor, nobody in content to be a spectator.” – Jean Cocteau

40. “To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.” – Victor Hugo

41. “Just add 3 letters to Paris, and you have paradise.” – Jules Renard

42. “That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me.” – Owen Wilson, Midnight in Paris

43. “She goes to the sea, passing through Paris… And … walks between the quays, in her beautiful green dress, and her golden lights.” – Jacques Prévert

44. “Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.” – Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

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

46. “If you’re going to be sad, you might as well be sad In Paris.” – Blair Waldorf, Gossip Girl

47. “Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.” – Honoré de Balzac

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

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

50. “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

51. “I could spend my whole life watching the Seine flow by… It is a poem of Paris.” – Blaise Cendrars

52. “The Pont Neuf is to the city what the heart is to the body : the center of movement and circulation.” – Louis-Sébastien Mercier

53. “London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” – G.K. Chesterson

54. “Of all the places I have been in Europe, Paris is the most fascinating.” – Washington Irving

55. “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

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

57. “Paris holds the key to your heart.” – Anastasia

58. “My aunt used to live in Paris… She told us that she jumped into the river once. Barefoot. She smiled.” – Emma Stone, La La Land

59. “Photographing couples on the banks of the Seine in the Spring – what a cliché! But why deprive yourself of the pleasure? Every time I encounter lovers, my camera smiles; let it do its job.” – Willy Ronis

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

61. “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

62. “Paris is the most beautiful city in the world. It brings tears to your eyes.” – Lee Radziwill

63. “In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.” – Gaston Leroux

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

65. “All Parisians know instances of serenity and grace : crossing the Seine and looking to the left and the right and saying to themselves, ‘ooh la!'”, Cédric Klapisch

66. “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

67. “Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

69. “The Seine sings, sings, sings, sings. Sings all day and all night because she is in love. And her lover – it’s Paris.” – La Seine, a popular song from 1948

70. “Paris… is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers, to those capable of amusing themselves in its streets without regard to time when urgent business requires their presence elsewhere.” – Julien Green

As a New Yorker myself, who has now been living in Paris for nearly 20 years, I’d have to agree!

71. “Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes.” – Henry James

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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, Interview with a Vampire

“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

76. “God invented Parisians so foreigners wouldn’t understand anything about French people.” – Alexandre Dumas

77. “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

78. “I can never decide whether Paris is more beautiful by day or by night.” – Adriana in Midnight in Paris

79. “Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.” – Michael Simkin

80. “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

Eiffel Tower in the Fall - quotes about Paris

81. “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

82. “I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world.” – Charles Dickens

83. “I do not believe there is another city on earth so beautiful as Paris nor another people with such an appreciation of the beautiful as the French…” – Edward Hopper

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

85. “France is beautiful. I stood at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower today and looked up at it. There are very few times in my life I’ve felt so small.” – Leisa Rayven

86. “Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?” – Djuna Barnes