Flaneur Quotes

In the early 1830s the writer George Sand, a woman, had a man's overcoat and a pair of boots made for her so she could have the same pleasure - to walk the streets of Paris free to look at whatever she liked. In her autobiography she writes: "I can't express the pleasure my boots gave me ... With those little iron-shot heels, I was on solid pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world. And then, my clothes feared nothing. I ran out in every kind of weather, I came home at every sort of hour ... No one paid any attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise ... No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd. ~ Randon Billings Noble

The greatest pleasure does not consist in experiencing new things, but in savoring the infinite variation of what we already know ~ Federico Castigliano

There's no word for it in English. Like tristesse, flaneur, or la douler exquise, words full of gray. The French do ambiguity so much better than Americans. Our language relies on fixedness because that's what the market demands. A commodity must always be identifiable. ~ Stephanie Danler

I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets. ~ Tom Hodgkinson

The French have the perfect word for it: 'flaneur'. It means to stroll around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flaneur as 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'. ~ Gemma Burgess