City is a large town. Inspirational city quotes will inspire growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
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Famous City Quotes
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning. Cyril Connolly
There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave. Charlotte Eriksson
I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all. Michelangelo
Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected. Roman Payne
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it. Seamus Heaney
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. Italo Calvino
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. Margaret Mead
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters. Charles Baudelaire
The city disappears street by street as you enter it. Ian Seed
I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. Robert De Niro
I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it. Truman Capote
As an artificial world, the city should be so in the best sense made by art, shaped for human purposes. Kevin Lynch
You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. Italo Calvino
A hick town is one in which there is no place to go where you shouldn’t be. Alexander Woollcott
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. Jane Jacobs
We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation. John F. Kennedy
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light? Or just another lost angel. City of Night? Jim Morrison
Ant swarming City. City full of dreams. Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve. Charles Baudelaire
For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home. Simon Van Booy
Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. William Gibson
The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet. Laini Taylor
As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach. Albert Camus
Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, Polo said. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little. Italo Calvino
A city that outdistances man’s walking powers is a trap for man. Arnold Joseph Toynbee
This was how it was with travel one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad. Roman Payne
These technologies reshaped the physical aspects of living in cities how far a person could travel or how high a building could climb. Christian Madera
Walkers are practitioners of the city, for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. Rebecca Solnit
New York now leads the world’s great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn’t make a sudden move. David Letterman
I don’t know what London’s coming to the higher the buildings the lower the morals. Noël Coward
The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. Lewis Mumford
With cities, it is as with dreams everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. Italo Calvino
You cannot take it as a fait accompli that the city’s going to come back. Mitch Landrieu
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim. Christopher Morley
The pressure of survival in the big city will make you lose sight of your dream. Hang in there. James De La Vega
Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing. Neil Gaiman
The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families. Malcolm Gladwell
By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Jane Jacobs
Seasons change. So do cities. People come into your life and people go, but it’s comforting to know the ones you love are always in your heart. And if you’re very lucky, a plane ride away. Michael Patrick King
The city’s full of people who you just see around. Terry Pratchett
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
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running. Edward Albee
Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad. Roman Payne
Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench. Chief Seattle
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters. Charles Baudelaire
A city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new again. Rasmenia Massoud
There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city. Kathleen Norris
American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash All of them surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. John Steinbeck
What is the city but the people? William Shakespeare
Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub. Jack Kerouac
The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant heap. But it is also a conscious work of art. Lewis Mumford
Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real. Nelson Algren
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. John Rushkin
The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men. In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. G.K. Chesterton
Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Roman Payne
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune teller’s, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination. Rebecca Solnit
All cities are mad but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim. Christopher Morley
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death? Emil Cioran
The movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth. Rainer Maria Rilke
Budapest is a prime site for dreams the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation. M. John Harrison
There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. Hubert Selby Jr.
Why do people resist engines, bridges, and cities so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves. Mark Helprin
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one. Aristotle
It’s the place built out of Man’s ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man’s endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth. Nelson Algren
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. Jane Jacobs
But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea. John Updike
In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem solving, problem creating frenzy. Neal Shusterman
The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things. Terry Pratchett
A city is a place where interesting always beats beautiful. Megan Harlan
In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship around participation in public life. Rebecca Solnit
If you love nature, stay the heck away from it. Live in a city, the denser the better. Jeff Speck
To be far from the madding crowd is to be mad indeed. A.E. Coppard
In Rome you long for the country; in the country oh inconstant! you praise the distant city to the stars. Horace
For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there. Ernest Hemingway
Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. Georgia O’Keeffe
And except on a certain kind of winter evening six thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. Joan Didion
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together. Herbert Prochnow
But ideal cities are very much the product of their own ages. Designed as complete urban statements, they bear the unmistakable imprint of their own culture and world view in every street and building. And yet to be successful a city has to be open to continuous development, free to evolve and grow with the demands of new times. Like science fiction accounts of the future, ideal cities quickly become outmoded. P.D. Smith
What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city. Coriolanus III
Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves. Jane Jacobs
There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave. Charlotte Eriksson
Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts census tracts, special purpose bond issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. Thomas Pynchon
