There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.
—Edward Hoagland (b.1932) American Essayist, Novelist
How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements.
—Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese Author, Philologist
We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.
—Desmond Morris (b.1928) English Ethologist, Writer
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Poet
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
—Aristotle (384BCE–322BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Scholar
If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.
—Charles Caleb Colton (c.1780–1832) English Clergyman, Aphorist
The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
Men, by associating in large masses, as in camps and cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds, but weaken their morals; thus a retrocession in the one, is too often the price they pay for a refinement of the other.
—Charles Caleb Colton (c.1780–1832) English Clergyman, Aphorist
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
—E. M. Forster (1879–1970) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist
God the first garden made, and Cain the first city.
—Abraham Cowley (1618–67) English Poet, Essayist
The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.
—Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British Historian
I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.
—W. C. Fields (1880–1946) American Actor, Comedian, Writer
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.
—Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish Poet
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders.
—Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American Biographer, Novelist, Socialist
New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.
—Johnny Carson (1925–2005) American Comedian
Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.
—Edward Hoagland (b.1932) American Essayist, Novelist
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist
Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
The city is recruited from the country.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
—Margaret Mead (1901–78) American Anthropologist, Social Psychologist
Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay … a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
I have found by experience, that they who have spent all their lives in cities, contract not only an effeminacy of habit, but of thinking.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
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 movable feast.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.
—Italian Proverb
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.
—Tacitus (56–117) Roman Orator, Historian
One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
—Thomas Wolfe (1900–38) American Novelist
If you suppress the exorbitant love of pleasure and money, idle curiosity, iniquitous purpose, and wanton mirth, what a stillness would there be in the greatest cities.
—Jean de La Bruyere (1645–96) French Satiric Moralist, Author
All things may be bought in Rome with money.
—Juvenal (c.60–c.136 CE) Roman Poet
The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American Novelist
I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
—Michelangelo (1475–1564) Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Poet, Engineer
New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.
—Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American Novelist, Essayist
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.
—Don Herold (1889–1966) American Humorist, Writer, Illustrator, Cartoonist
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist—this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul—a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
—Margaret Mead (1901–78) American Anthropologist, Social Psychologist
All great art is born of the metropolis.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic