Flaneur Quotes

“The destiny of every walking man is to immerse himself in the panorama surrounding him, to the point of becoming one with it and, ultimately, to vanish".”
― Federico Castigliano, Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“The greatest pleasure does not consist in experiencing new things, but in savoring the infinite variation of what we already know”
― Federico Castigliano, Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris

“Free and alone in the maze of the city, the flâneur craves a revelation that might change his life and destiny.”
― Federico Castigliano, Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris

“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, Be with Me Always: Essays

“The prevailing interest in the world of phenomena and the flâneur’s freedom of movement contrasted on the one hand with the principles of the metaphysical and religious tradition on which pre-industrial civilization was based and, on the other, with the dogma of productivity which held sway over the nascent bourgeois society. Hence the paradoxical nature of the flâneur, the shattered mirror of modernity. He acts out his own dissonant idleness right in the beating heart of the city and he steeps himself in the tumult of the crowd while seeking to maintain a critical detachment.”
― Federico Castigliano, Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris

“You have made my day a little better, and I hope I have made your day a little better, too”
― Mo Willems, The Story of Diva and Flea

“At about eight-thirty or nine the friends make a halt, already in sight of Moranchel. Moranchel is on the left of the Cifuentes road, at some two hundred paces from the highway. It is a gloomy, dark town that seems to have no business being surrounded by green fields. The old man sits down in the ditch and the traveler lies on his back and looks up at some little clouds, graceful as doves, which are floating in the sky. A stork flies past, not very high, with a snake in its beak. Some partridge fly up from a bed of thyme. An adolescent goatherd and a member of his flock are sinning one of the oldest of sins in the shade of a hawthorn tree blooming with tiny sweet-smelling flowers, white as orange blossoms. ― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels Through the Spanish Countryside”
― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels through the Spanish Countryside

“É sempre uma aventura entrar num espaço desconhecido, porque a vida e a personalidade dos que o ocupam vão infundindo nele as suas características, de tal modo que, assim que entramos, passamos a respirar novas formas de emoção.”
― Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

“He wants to hold himself to this and not just disappear into the underground, burying himself beneath a city he no long looks at. Tomorrow he'll walk or take a bus – there must be a bus that follows a direct route across the city from his house to his work instead of describing the peculiar horseshoe around which he travels every day beneath the earth – he will make a journey overland, allowing him to look up and take stock of all that each street has to offer. He will roam from one side of town to the other, like a treasure seeker but with no map or coordinates, with no references or clues, leaving chance to do its work, letting an invisible hand carry him through the city, guiding his determination to rediscover something that, until recently, he didn't even realize he had lost.”
― Claudia Piñeiro, Las grietas de Jara

“Perhaps there is to be found in Pastrana the key to something which happens in Spain more frequently than is necessary. Past splendor overwhelms and in the end exhausts the people's will; and without force of will, as can be seen in so many cases, by being exclusively occupied with the contemplation of the glories of the past, they leave current problems unsolved. When the belly is empty and the mind filled with golden memories, the golden memories continually retreat and at last, though no one goes so far as to admit it, there is even doubt whether they ever existed and there is nothing left of them but a benevolent and useless cultural residue.”
― Camilo José Cela

“Inwardly - nobody knows why - the passengers on one train always envy slightly the passengers on another train; it is something that's true but a little difficult to explain. Maybe it's because, even though they don't realize it very clearly, a third-class passenger would always be glad to change places with another, even if the other were third-class too. ― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels Through the Spanish Countryside”
― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels through the Spanish Countryside

“…I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience... But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!”
― Virginia Woolf

“Flaneur is the French word for walker, or saunterer. A flaneur is someone who walks as self-expression and exploration. For the flaneur, it is not about getting from point A to point B, or about getting into shape. The act of walking is its own reward. A flaneur walks the City in order to experience it, to fully participate through observation and peregrination.”
― Karen Duffy, Backbone: Living with Chronic Pain without Turning into One

“Los lugares por los que paso pasan a través de mí; me colman con su gravedad, con su inercia; me dan el vacío, la mudez o la locuacidad, o, en el peor de los casos, la verborrea, que me deja triste. En el fondo sólo hay dos preguntas: ¿qué son los lugares? y ¿quién soy yo en este, en ese, en aquel lugar?”
― Wolfgang Hermann, París Berlín Nueva York. Transformaciones

“La figura del flâneur, famosa por su rol en la obra de Charles Baudelaire, remite a un caballero que es un “espectador apasionado” de la ciudad, que ansía “volverse uno con la multitud”, estar en el centro mismo de la acción y aun así ser invisible.”
― Leslie Kern, Feminist City: A Field Guide

“Well, when I'm your age, I hope that I'll have worked out something for myself, because I don't want to be free and lost all my life.”
― Mark Hyatt, Love, Leda

“From the chalices of my meditation I drink only the smile of the palest wine; I drink it with my eyes only, then close them, and life passes me by like a distant candle.”
― Pessoa Fernando, The Book of Disquiet