Paris has a way of making you wax lyrical, get all poetic about even the most commonplace of things, likes a sprig of sage at the local market, a sun-faded pastel door, or a striped awning over a terrace café. So when the greatest wordsmiths get to the subject of the City of Light, you can expect extra sparkle. These are some of the loveliest quotes about this loveliest of cities …

‘Paris isn’t for changing planes… It’s… It’s for changing your outlook. For throwing open the windows and letting in… letting in la vie en rose.’ — Sabrina Fairchild (played by Audrey Hepburn), Sabrina (above)

‘At last I have come into a dreamland.’ — Harriet Beecher Stowe

‘A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life.’ — Thomas Jefferson

‘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

‘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

‘To breathe Paris is to preserve the soul.’ — Victor Hugo

‘There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.’ — Ernest Hemingway

‘To know Paris is to know a great deal.’ — Henry Miller

‘I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles…’ — Cole Porter

‘Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.’ — Honoré de Balzac

‘I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!’ — Charles Dickens

‘Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes.’ — Henry James

 ‘Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.’ — Angela Carter

‘The pearl-grey city, the opal that is Paris.’ — Anaïs Nin

‘We’ll always have Paris.’ — Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart), Casablanca