cities-in-france

"Immaculate Conception"

"I don't think our therapeutic successes can compete with those of Lourdes; the people who believe in the miracles of the Holy Virgin are much more numerous than those who believe in the existence of the unconscious. (Sigmund Freud)"

"For Mariam ad Iesum. This is the meaning of the Lourdes apparitions. (Pope John XXIII)"

"That cave is the place where what Catholic Mariology is is most evident: a bubo of authentic Christology. (Karl Barth)"

"All those who were physically healed in Lourdes have died or will die, even if for evils other than those for which they turned to Mary's intercession. [...] It is an obvious reflection, perhaps apparently banal. Yet, it allows us to clarify the Catholic's perspective in the face of the impressive dossier of "physical" healings which, at the foot of the Pyrenees, have not ceased to occur since 1858. The believer, that is, knows that what is promised by the Gospel - what 'everyone' is promised - it is indeed the radical and definitive "healing" of the body too; but only when this is resurrected to eternal life. (Vittorio Messori)"

"Yes, it has been a long and painful journey. I went to Lourdes in January and felt great straight after for a long time. It's an incredible place. (Cristiano De André)"

"In Lourdes Mary never puts herself in the foreground."

"In Lourdes, in the climate of faith - full of peace and joy - which is typical of it and without pseudo-mystical exaltation, the disease ceases to scare both those who are well and those who are sick."

"Lourdes is much more a city of volunteers than of merchants."

"Bernadetta Soubirous"

"Sometimes, bringing a silent film to Lourdes, he starts talking. (Romano Bertola)"

"Through the apparitions of Lourdes, Our Lady wanted to restore in us the love of the poor and poverty, an ingenious and liberating love. (René Laurentin)"

"We delude ourselves that we will obtain a miracle in Lourdes, even though in one hundred and fifty years Our Lady has officially granted only sixty-five, to one hundred million pilgrims. An average, less than one in a million, far lower than the percentage of spontaneous remissions of tumors, which is of the order of one in ten thousand. Not to mention that, as Émile Zola observed, among the votive offerings you can see many crutches but no wooden legs. (Piergiorgio Odifreddi)"

"I must say that there, in front of the cave, you can feel something that I don't know how to define, something great, mysterious, indescribable. (Gianni Morandi)"

"Until three o'clock I prefer Lourdes water! It's more pious. (Thérèse of Lisieux)"

"Lourdes – if believers are right – is a glimpse suddenly opened onto an Other World; it is the truth entrusted not to professors and experts, but to the illiterate; it is Heaven itself that ratifies the dogmas of a Pope, moreover "obscurantist" and "reactionary" like Pius IX: it is the mocked Catholic Mariology that has full confirmation; it is the blind who regains his sight, the cancerous person who heals, the paralytic who walks. Lourdes is – and cannot help but be – the scandal, the division, the denial of the common sense imposed by the new conformism. It has therefore not ceased its provocative role; nor, for that matter, will it ever be able to cease it. (Vittorio Messori)"

"If Strasbourg had fallen from the sky, it could not have been in a more beautiful place. (German proverb)"

"Go to Strasbourg! there you will find the table set. (German proverb)"

"In Strasbourg itself there were no gaps between past and present. Romanesque and Gothic Middle Ages, Baroque and the most recent constructions after 1871, all stood on top of each other, constituting, not exactly a harmonious unity, but nevertheless that unity and continuity of historical life which overcomes even the most enormous tensions and recalls the continuous struggle and the changing fortunes of the people. (Friedrich Meinecke)"

"I like this city of Strasbourg more than I can say. I love this Alsatian character, something hospitable and free; I love this cathedral so close to me, I especially love the proximity of the Rhine. It makes me think of everything that is unlimited in history; to the Celts, to all the hordes that have stopped for a long time on its banks. (Edgar Quinet)"

"Lake Como is like Saint-Tropez and Capri. (Lady Gaga)"

"He is not the Duke of Brittany who is not the Lord of Brest."

"Being of this age, his father ordained to have clothes made to him in his own livery, which was white and blue. To work then went the tailors, and with great expedition were those clothes made, cut, and sewed, according to the fashion that was then in request. I find by the ancient records or pancarts, to be seen in the chamber of accounts, or court of the exchequer at Montsoreau, that he was accoutred in manner as followeth. To make him every shirt of his were taken up nine hundred ells of Chasteleraud linen, and two hundred for the gussets, in manner of cushions, which they put under his armpits. His shirt was not gathered nor plaited, for the plaiting of shirts was not found out till the seamstresses (when the point of their needle (Besongner du cul, Englished The eye of the needle.) was broken) began to work and occupy with the tail."

"Then unto every one of them out of his coffers caused he to be given the sum of twelve hundred thousand crowns ready money. And, further, he gave to each of them for ever and in perpetuity, unless he should happen to decease without heirs, such castles and neighbouring lands of his as were most commodious for them. To Ponocrates he gave the rock Clermond; to Gymnast, the Coudray; to Eudemon, Montpensier; Rivau, to Tolmere, to Ithibolle, Montsoreau; to Acamas, Cande; Varenes, to Chironacte; Gravot, to Sebast; Quinquenais, to Alexander; Legre, to Sophrone, and so of his other places."

"He did swim in deep waters on his belly, on his back, sideways, with all his body, with his feet only, with one hand in the air, wherein he held a book, crossing thus the breadth of the river of Seine without wetting it, and dragged along his cloak with his teeth, as did Julius Caesar; then with the help of one hand he entered forcibly into a boat, from whence he cast himself again headlong into the water, sounded the depths, hollowed the rocks, and plunged into the pits and gulfs."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"The jobless and hopeless kids in the suburbs may burn a couple of cars, but we’ll always have Paris."

"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.”"

"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 ; 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.”"

"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."

"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."

"Outside the curtained windows, Paris stewed in its miasma of self-congratulation and diesel fumes."

"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."

"America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be."

"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."

"Good talkers are only found in Paris."

"Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art."

"Il en coûte bien cher pour mourir à Paris."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Paris dictates fashion to the whole world."

"We'll always have Paris."

"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."