39 Best Eiffel Tower Quotes (Dreamy, Funny, Inspiring!)

The Eiffel Tower is a symbol of romance in the City of Love.  And its nightly twinkling lights show is one of the reasons to love the City of Light.

(I make sure to visit the Eiffel Tower and look for its glittering nightly show on every trip to Paris!)

I’m not the only one who feels this way!

There are many fabulous quotes about the Eiffel Tower.  Everyone from famous writers to comedians has something to say about ‘the Iron Lady’.

I’ve rounded up all the best Eiffel Tower quotes for you.  They’ll have you dreaming of your next trip to Paris!

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Best Quotes about the Eiffel Tower

Famous Quotes about the Eiffel Tower

You’re sure to have run across some of these famous Eiffel Tower quotes before.

Some are funny, some are inspiring, but they all express the wonder that is the Eiffel Tower.

(And since many of these quotes are short and sweet, they make for perfect Eiffel Tower captions for Instagram!)

1. “I like the Eiffel Tower because it looks like steel and lace.”    ~ Natalie Lloyd

2. “France is beautiful. I stood at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower today and looked up at it. There are very few times in my life I’ve felt so small.”     ~ Leisa Rayven

3. “Every time I look at the Eiffel Tower, it completely blows my mind.”     ~ Brian Fallon

4. “The Eiffel Tower was once thought impossible to build.” ~ Hector Jesus Arencibia

5. “984; 85; 3; 63;, 1,000,000.  The Eiffel Tower is nine hundred eighty-four feet high. On a clear day, you can see eighty-five miles from the top. It has three elevators. Each elevator can carry sixty-three people. It cost about one million dollars to build Eiffel Tower.” ~ Suzy Kline

Funny Eiffel Tower Quotes

Everyone’s a comedian when it comes to the Eiffel Tower! 

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise.  Anything as famous as the Eiffel Tower is any easy cultural reference. 

Here are some of my favorite fun Eiffel Tower quotes – I’ll bet you can’t get through this list without a chuckle!  (Or at least a smirk.)

6. “The Eiffel Tower is the Empire State Building after taxes.” ~ Unknown

7. When President Chirac gave [President] Bush a souvenir statue of the Eiffel Tower… Bush said ‘This is great! A little oil rig!’ ~ Jay Leno

8. “The Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower.  They’re monumental.  They’re straight out of Page 52 in your school history book.”     ~ Billy Crystal

9. “I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower.  Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.”     ~ Bill Bryson

10. “I don’t like being up high. It took me three days to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower.” ~ Ray Bradbury

11. I always wish the hotels were like they are in movies and TV shows, where if you’re in Paris, right outside your window is the Eiffel Tower. In Egypt, the pyramids are right there. In the movies, every hotel has a monument right outside your window. My hotel rooms overlook the garbage dumpster in the back alley. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

12. “I should go to Paris and jump off of the Eiffel Tower. If I took the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier.” ~ Woody Allen

13. “You show up in Paris, and on the drive from the airport to the hotel you’re like, ‘This is so cool! I want to see something! I want to go to the Eiffel Tower!’ And then you leave the next morning. You think, Oh, I didn’t get to do anything. I tell people: I’ve been just about everywhere, but I’ve seen nothing.” ~Taylor Lautner   

14. I like the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas more than the actual one. ~David LaChapelle

Eiffel Tower Love Quotes

Paris is known as the City of Love.  Countless people have received marriage proposals at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

Just try to walk through Paris at night without running across photographers holding big bouquets of heart-shaped balloons, looking to capture your romantic moment in Paris!

But surprisingly, I couldn’t round up very many romantic quotes about the Eiffel Tower! 

Sure, there are plenty of Instagram captions like ‘Eiffel for you in Paris”, but not very many actual quotes.

(Maybe I need to start quoting myself…)

15. “Don’t just stand there with your Eiffel Tower smile. Tell me you love me, and tell me in French.” ~ Jarod Kintz

16. “If I had the true colours to describe what I feel for you, I wouldn’t waste time stringing beads of words… Instead I would run to kiss you and leave monuments on you: pyramids on your lips, the Taj Mahal on your skin, and the Eiffel Tower in your heart.” ~ Daniel Derrick Mwesigye

Nostalgic quotes about the Eiffel Tower

When I think about La Tour Eiffel (and other famous Paris landmarks) I get a touch of nostalgia and get lost in thoughts about Paris.

If you love Paris as much as I do, these quotes are sure to resonate with you. 

(Need more reasons to love Paris?   Here are more of my favorite Paris quotes for you!)

17. “Eiffel Tower is more than a landmark; she’s Paris’s missing rib.” ~ Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

18. “I miss a lot about Paris. After three and a half years, you get a little sick of it, and you just want to be home. But there are little things, sights. Like seeing the Eiffel Tower every day, that’s kind of cool.” ~Lindsey Horan

19. “I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I’ve seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I’m really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home.” ~ Kristin Harmel

20. “My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.” ~ Roger Ebert

21. “It looked very different from the Statue of Liberty, but what did that matter? What was the good of having the statue without the liberty, the freedom to go where one chose if one was held back by one’s color? No, I preferred the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises.” ~ Josephine Baker

22. “Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it’s too late. They wouldn’t even let us up.” ~ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

23. “It was immensely awkward. If the streets looked sewn together with a neat hand, la Tour Eiffel was the ungainly needle pinning it all into place. It lanced through the grand boulevards, elegant cupolas, and buildings draped in sculpted gods. It would never blend in, but always demand witnessing.” ~ Roshani Chokshi, The Gilded Wolves

Gustave Eiffel Quotes

Gustave Eiffel was a French civil engineer.  He is, of course, best known as the man who built the Eiffel Tower.

His success with the creation of the Eiffel Tower earned him the nickname “magician of iron”.

Here are a few quotes from the illustrious Gustave Eiffel which show how he felt about design — you can see how passionate he was about his craft!

24. ““I ought to be jealous of the tower. She is more famous than I am.”     ~ Gustave Eiffel

(This is one of the best funny Eiffel Tower quotes.  It shows that Eiffel had a sense of humor –and humility — about his creation)

25. “The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use.” – Gustave Eiffel

26. “It seems to me that it had no other rationale than to show that we are not simply the country of entertainers, but also that of engineers and builders called from across the world to build bridges, viaducts, stations and major monuments of modern industry, the Eiffel Tower deserves to be treated with consideration.” ~ Gustave Eiffel

27. “Well, I think the curves of the four pillars of the monument, as the calculations have provided them,… give it a great sense of force and beauty.” ~ Gustave Eiffel

28. “Being the most striking manifestation of the art of metal structures by which our engineers have shown in Europe, it [the Eiffel Tower] is one of the most striking of our modern national genius.” ~ Gustave Eiffel

29. “Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren’t the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? … Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply.” ~Gustave Eiffel

30. “The French flag is the only one to have a staff a thousand feet tall.” ~ Gustave Eiffel

31. “Without tracing back to the Tower of Babel, one can observe that the very idea of building a very tall tower has long haunted human imagination. That kind of victory over the formidable law of gravity that tethers man to the ground has always appeared to him a symbol of the force and the challenges overcome.” ~ Gustave Eiffel

Quotes about Eiffel Tower History

Eiffel’s unique design won the competition to build a monument for the 1889 International Exposition.

Did you know that the Eiffel Tower was meant to be a temporary structure?  What a loss that would have been!

Luckily for us, plans changed and we still have the Eiffel Tower to grace the Paris skyline! 

Over the decades since its construction, the Eiffel Tower has played a central role in Paris and historical events.

32. “Though it may be hard to believe today, the Eiffel Tower was initially met with derision by many Frenchmen, some of whom compared it to the Tower of Babel and complained that the “useless and monstrous” structure would obscure treasures such as Notre Dame.” ~ Charles River Editors, The Eiffel Tower: The History of Paris’ Most Famous Landmark

33. “Men flocked to see it and ascended it as it was a novelty and of unique dimensions. It was the toy of the exhibition. So long as we are children we are attracted by toys, and the tower was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets. That may be claimed to be the purpose served by the Eiffel Tower.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

34. “When the Germans occupied Paris, they housed a beacon light in the Tower to guide their night planes. The victorious United States Army requisitioned this landmark as a radar transmission point.” ~ Maynard Owen Williams

35. “After the occupation of Paris, Hitler visited Paris, which of course was a great jewel for him, and he wanted to go up on the Eiffel Tower and gaze down upon the city of Paris, which he’d conquered. For some reason the elevators mysteriously stopped working that day. Some people say it might have had to do with the French resistance. So he couldn’t go up.”  ~ Joe Harris 

(Tip: If you’re a fan of historical fiction, check out the novel “Paris” by Edward Rutherfurd.  It’s a meaty novel spanning centuries of history in Paris, and one key storyline focuses on the construction of the Eiffel Tower.)

More Quotes about the Eiffel Tower

Well, while I love it, the Eiffel Tower isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

(Gasp!)

Here are a few Eiffel Tower quotes from those who apparently weren’t that impressed…

36. “When you are on top you are on the only spot in Paris where you can’t see the damned thing.” ~ William Morris, on why he spent so much time on the Eiffel Tower.

37. “It seems to be saying perpetually; ‘I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust.’ … It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for all the things in Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul.” ~ Hilaire Belloc

38. “But Paris, all in all, isn’t what it used to be, ever since that pencil sharpener, the Eiffel Tower, has been sticking up in the distance, visible from every angle.” ~ Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

39. “I haven’t seen the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre. I haven’t seen anything. I don’t really care.” ~Tyra Banks