Paris (original) (raw)

The Eiffel Tower

Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It is situated on the Seine River, in the north of the country, at the heart of the Île-de-France region. Within its administrative limits (the 20 arrondissements), the city had 2,241,346 inhabitants in 2014 while its metropolitan area is one of the largest population centres in Europe with more than 12 million inhabitants.

CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

The Arc de Triomphe

L'Hôtel national des Invalides

Notre-Dame Cathedral

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris

The Pont Neuf bridge at sunset.

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

In alphabetical order by author or source.

• Il en coûte bien cher pour mourir à Paris.
  • Les Etourdis, Act I., Sc. II. — (Daiglemoni).
  • To die in Paris costs a pretty penny.
  • François Andrieux Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 56.
• In Paris a queer little man you may see,
  A little man all in gray;
  Rosy and round as an apple is he,
  Content with the present whate'er it may be,
  While from care and from cash he is equally free,
  And merry both night and day!
  "Ma foi! I laugh at the world." says he,
  "I laugh at the world, and the world laughs at me!"
  What a gay little man in gray.
  • Pierre-Jean de Béranger The Little Man all in Gray, translation by Amelia B. Edwards; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 133.
• Lindbergh's arrival in Paris became the defining moment of his life, that event on which all his future actions hinged — as though they were but a predestined series of equal but opposite reactions, fraught with irony... In the spring of 1927, Lindbergh had been too consumed by what he called "the single objective of landing my plane at Paris" to have considered its aftermath. "To plan beyond that had seemed an act of arrogance I could not afford," he would later write. Even if he had thought farther ahead, however, he could never have predicted the unprecedented global response to his arrival.
  By that year, radio, telephones, radiographs, and the Bartlane Cable Process could transmit images and voices around the world within seconds. What was more, motion pictures had just mastered the synchronization of sound, allowing dramatic moments to be preserved in all their glory and distributed worldwide. For the first time all of civilization could share as one the sights and sounds of an event — almost instantaneously and simultaneously. And in this unusually good-looking, young aviator — of apparently impeccable character — the new technology found its first superstar.
  The reception in Paris was only a harbinger of the unprecedented worship people would pay Lindbergh for years. Without either belittling or aggrandizing the importance of his flight, he considered it part of the continuum of human endeavor, and that he was, after all, only a man. The public saw more than that... Universally admired, Charles Lindbergh became the most celebrated living person ever to walk the Earth.
  • A. Scott Berg in Lindbergh (1998)
• Paris dictates fashion to the whole world.
  • Maria Callas, as quoted in Women's Wear Daily (20 December 1958), Marie-Jacques Perrier, 'Grande nuit de l’Opéra', New York.
• We'll always have Paris.
  • In the film Casablanca: Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine recalling happier days with Ilsa Laszlo (Ingrid Bergman).
• The urban renewal programme is one of the most spectacular urban programmes to have been undertaken in Paris; it is certainly the one which has provoked the biggest public outcry. The renewal programme in the strict sense of the term, has two essential characteristics:

1. It concerns an already structured social space, of which it changes the form, the social content and/or function.
2. It is based on public initiative, whatever the legal or financial form of the renewal agency, where private enterprise may take over the work, as in the case of Opératioll Italie.
   • Manuel Castells (1972) "Urban renewal and social conflict in Paris" In: Social Science Information Vol 11. p. 94

• I am working in Paris. I cannot for a single day get the thought out of my head that there probably exists something essential, some immutable reality, and now that I have lost everything else (thank God, it gets lost all on its own) I am trying to preserve this and, what is more, not to be content. In a word: I am working.
  • Marc Chagall, A letter to A. N. Benois, 1911, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 146
• Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back.. ..It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia (where Chagall was born, fh) took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me, or something of the sort.. ..It was as if Russian art had been fatally condemned to remain in the wake of the West. (on his arrival in Paris in 1910, fh)
  • Marc Chagall My life, Marc Chagall, 1922; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock -, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 261, (translation Daphne Woodward)
• Paris is a city of amusements and pleasures, where four fifths of the inhabitants die of the spleen.
  • Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort. The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, Volume 99, December, 1799, p. 405.
• Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”
  • Boston to Divest From Fossil Fuels, Tobacco, Private Prisons, Chief Investment Officer, Dec 6, 2021
• Aline and I have travelled a very long, very hard road together, from our working class homes in rural Quebec to the palaces of London, Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. Politics was the route, public service the reward.
  • Jean Chrétien, My Years As Prime Minister (2007) Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007, ISBN 978-0-676-97900-8 Chapter Fourteen, Vive le Canada, p. 406
• Paris is like a pretty woman; when she gives you a smack, you don't smack back.
  • Dietrich von Choltitz; as quoted in Dallas, Gregor (2006). 1945: The War That Never Ended p. 178. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300119886
• I had a great Desire to see Paris, & its Curiosities: that being generally esteemed the Centre of Taste, Magnificence, Beauty & every Thing that is polite.
  • William Cole, journal entry (9 May 1766), quoted in William Cole, A Journal of My Journey to Paris in the Year 1765, ed. Francis Griffin Stokes (1931), p. 1
• Tuit estrangier l'aiment et ameront,
  Car pour deduit et pour estre jolis,
  Jamais cité tele ne trouveront:
  Riens ne se puet comparer a Paris.
  • All strangers love her, will always find her fair,
    Because such elegance, such happiness,
    Will not be found in any town but this:
    Paris is beyond compare.
  • Eustache Deschamps "Quant j'ay la terre et mer avironnée", line 17; text and translation from Ian S. Laurie and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (eds.), David Curzon and Jeffrey Fiskin (trans.) Eustache Deschamps: Selected Poems (London: Routledge, 2003) pp. 62-63.
• 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 Tourists in Paris, from Outside: Selected Writings (1984)
• 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 America for Me (1909) Lines 9-12.
• The creation of Modern France through expansion goes back to the establishment of a small kingdom in the area around Paris in the late tenth century and was not completed until the incorporation of Nice and Savoy in 1860. The existing "hexagon" was the result of a long series of wars and conquests involving the triumph of French language and culture over what once were autonomous and culturally distinctive communities. The assimilation of Gascons, Savoyards, Occitans, Basques, and others helped to sustain the myth that French overseas expansionism in the nineteenth century, especially to North and West Africa, was a continuation of the same assmilationist project.
  • George M. Fredrickson, Race, Ethnicity, and National Identity in France and the United States: A Comparative Historical Overview, November 8, 2003.
• 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 (1964) Epigraph
• I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
  • Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast (1964) Epigraph
• 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 A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (1964) Epigraph
• Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, chapter 6, p. 143 (1868), originally published 1858
• Paris somehow lends itself to conceptual new ideas. I don't know why it is. There is a certain magic to that city.
  • Walter Kohn In a discussion with UCSD's Ivan Schuller, on UCTV Series: "UCSD Guestbook" (9/1999) (Science) (Show ID: 4136)
• Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke.
  • Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd (1943), p. 85
• Fair Paris caught the crimson hue —
  Well may I call it fair.
  With its pure heaven of softest blue.
  Its clear and sunny air —
  Soft fell the morning o’er each dome
  That rises mid the sky ;
  And, conscious of the day to come,
  Demand their place on high.
  Round the Pantheon’s height was wrought
  A web of royal red ;
  A glory as if morning brought
  Its homage to the dead.
  And Notre Dame’s old gothic towers
  Were bathed in roseate bloom,
  As Time himself had scattered flowers
  Over that mighty tomb.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1835 (1834), 'Introduction'
• The words of the great French anthem rang out over the town square, sung for the first time by liberated Frenchmen in the free capital of Normandy and sung with such a feeling of life and warmth as has not been heard in France for four years.... Paris is the happiest city in the world tonight. All Paris is dancing in the streets.
  • Larry LeSueur, quotes in Goldstein, Richard. "Larry LeSueur, Pioneering War Correspondent, Dies at 93", (obituary), The New York Times, February 7, 2003, accessed June 21, 2011, from a radio broadcast following the 1944 Liberation of Paris.
• In Paris one is too preoccupied by what one sees and what one hears, however strong one is; what I am doing here has, I think, the merit of not resembling anyone, because it is simply the expression of what I myself have experienced.
  • Claude Monet, 1868 letter to Frédéric Bazille from Étretat, December 1868; As cited in: Mary Tompkins Lewis (2007) Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. p. 83
• Send me 300 francs; that sum will enable me to go to Paris. There, at least, one can cut a figure and surmount obstacles. Everything tells me I shall succeed. Will you prevent me from doing so for the want of 100 crowns?
  • Napoleon I of France Letter to his uncle, Joseph Fesch (June 1791), as quoted in A Selection from the Letters and Despatches of the First Napoleon. With Explanatory Notes (1884) edited by D. A. Bingham, Vol. I, p. 24
• The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.
  • George Orwell, Down and out in Paris and London (1933)
• The jobless and hopeless kids in the suburbs may burn a couple of cars, but we’ll always have Paris.
  • Ralph Peters, "The 'Eurabia' Myth" (26 November 2006), The New York Post
• As our tour of the history of forgotten violence comes within sight of the present, the landmarks start to look more familiar. But even the zone of cultural memory from the last century has relics that feel like they belong to a foreign country. Take the decline of martial culture. The older cities in Europe and the United States are dotted with public works that flaunt the nation’s military might. Pedestrians can behold statues of commanders on horseback, beefcake sculptures of well-hung Greek warriors, victory arches crowned by chariots, and iron fencing wrought into the shape of swords and spears. Subway stops are named for triumphant battles: the Paris Métro has an Austerlitz station; the London Underground has a Waterloo station. Photos from a century ago show men in gaudy military dress uniforms parading on national holidays and hobnobbing with aristocrats at fancy dinners. The visual branding of long-established states is heavy on aggressive iconography, such as projectiles, edged weapons, birds of prey, and predatory cats. Even famously pacifistic Massachusetts has a seal that features an amputated arm brandishing a sword and a Native American holding a bow and arrow above the state motto, “With the sword we seek peace, but under liberty.” Not to be outdone, neighboring New Hampshire adorns its license plates with the motto “Live Free or Die.”
  • Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012)
• Few areas of the national life of those Western European countries failed to benefit from the decades of parasitic exploitation of the colonies. One Nigerian, after visiting Brussels in 1960, wrote: “I saw for myself the massive palaces, museums and other public buildings paid for by Congo ivory and rubber.” In recent times, African writers and researchers have also been amazed to find the amount of looted African treasure stacked away in the British Museum; and there are comparable if somewhat smaller collections of African art in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Those are some of the things which, in addition to monetary wealth, help to define the metropoles as developed and “civilized.”
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 186
• Napoleon had forged his academic revolution with the creation of institutions such as the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale Superieure. But too strong an emphasis on mathematics serving the needs of the state had seen Paris lose its place as the focus of mathematical activity to the medieval town of Gottingen, where the more abstract approach of Gauss and Riemann was allowed to flourish. In the second half of the twentieth century there was a new optimism in France that Paris could regain its position as a key player in the world of mathematics.
  • Marcus du Sautoy (31 May 2012). The Music of the Primes: Why an unsolved problem in mathematics matters. HarperCollins Publishers. pp. 178-179. ISBN 978-0-00-737587-5.
• Seattle sucks. New York and Chicago are real cities. Seattle is Dubuque, Iowa, putting on airs. People here think Seattle is Paris... it ain't. I've been to Paris, and this place isn't Paris.
  • Dan Savage Interview on Zulkey.com. (2003-03-28)
• Outside the curtained windows, Paris stewed in its miasma of self-congratulation and diesel fumes.
  • Robert Sheckley, Hunter/Victim (1988), ISBN 0-451-15142-9, Chapter 1 (p. 11)
• It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle…. Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed, so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them.
  • Gen. Jan Christian Smuts, letter (Jan. 8, 1921); published in the New York Evening Post (March 2, 1921).
• America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be.
  • Gertrude Stein An American and France (1936)
• And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made.
  • Gertrude Stein An American and France (1936)
• Good talkers are only found in Paris.
  • François Villon, Des Femmes de Paris. ii.
• Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
  • Carlos Ruiz Zafón, in The Shadow of the Wind (25 January 2005), p. 68
• Paris flared — Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice.
  • Émile Zola Paris (1898) Last of Les Trois Villes [_The Three Cities_] trilogy

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