What Can One Say About Paris?

Marty and I just returned from a long weekend in Paris. Having only visited Paris a few times as a tourist, it’s hard to say anything about Paris without sounding pretentious, boring or simply ridiculous. I thought, however, you might be interested in some of the things other people have said about Paris (from www.brainyquote.com and thinkexist.com). (The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the blogger or her sponsor.)

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
Fred Allen

I stayed three weeks in Paris, fell in love with the city, and decided that I was born to live in Paris.
Ed Bradley

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief.
Nicolas de Chamfort

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

I thought of Paris as a beauty spot on the face of the earth, and of London as a big freckle.
James Weldon Johnson

I've been to Paris France and I've been to Paris Paramount. Paris Paramount is better.
Ernst Lubitsch

In Paris, it used to feel like you were living in a museum. As beautiful as it was, it's still limited. But here you have just everything.
Isaac Mizrahi

I used to live in Paris, but I left because youth culture doesn't really exist there.
Marc Newson

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.
Roman Polanski

Paris ain't much of a town.
Babe Ruth

I loved Paris more than any other place I had ever known.
Gloria Swanson

In Paris, questions of race or color are not considered - a man's professional skill and social qualities are fairly and ungrudgingly recognized.
Henry Ossawa Tanner

In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise.
Virgil Thomson

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

A city (Paris) where great ideas perish, done to death by a witticism.
Honore de Balzac

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, in 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

Here’s my personal favorite:

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