Cities Quotes

• If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Travel, Istanbul, Giving

  257 Copy quote

• There are so many cities in every single city.

  David Mitchell

  David Mitchell (2008). “Ghostwritten”, p.106, Hachette UK

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• [At] the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people. And we cannot see that as a problem.

  Eduardo Paes

  Motivation, Inspiration, People

  4 Copy quote

• The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

  Charles Baudelaire

  Heart, Paris, Form

  8 Copy quote

• So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  People, Dies

  4 Copy quote

• The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

  Euripides

  Men, Firsts, Born

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations". Compiled by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt and Kate Louise Roberts, 1922.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

  Italo Calvino

  Past, Hands, Doe

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be.

  Dave Eggers

  People, Dancing, Needs

  Dave Eggers (2009). “You Shall Know Our Velocity”, p.223, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

  Hugh Newell Jacobsen

  Reading, Pride, Looks

  "America’s Cities Are Innovating for the Future" by Eric E. Schmidt, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 12, 2013.

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, People, Together

  133 Copy quote

• The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Travel, Two, Firsts

  28 Copy quote

• Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Communication, Language And Power, Stones

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.160

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

  Michelangelo

  Love, Artist, Salvation

  56 Copy quote

• What is the city but the people?

  William Shakespeare

  Inspirational, Motivational, People

  William Shakespeare (2012). “Coriolanus”, p.61, Courier Corporation

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

  Rupert Brooke

  Cat, Night, City Life

  Rupert Brooke (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Rupert Brooke (Illustrated)”, p.123, Delphi Classics

  88 Copy quote

  Show source

• The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

  Desmond Morris

  Funny, Zoos, Concrete Jungle

  The Human Zoo (1969) p. 8

  175 Copy quote

  Show source

• A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

  Herbert V. Prochnow

  Inspirational, Funny, Humorous

  118 Copy quote

• Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  People, Growth, Force

  45 Copy quote

• The people are the city.

  William Shakespeare

  People

  William Shakespeare (2013). “Shakespeare's Complete Works”, p.4153, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

  Christopher Morley

  Beautiful, Mad, Literature

  CHRISTOPHER MORLEY (1922). “WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS”

  124 Copy quote

  Show source

• Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

  Walter Benjamin

  Ignorance, Feet, Names

  Walter Benjamin (1996). “Selected Writings: 1927-1934”, p.598, Harvard University Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

  Plato

  Plato, War, Two

  Plato (1977). “The Portable Plato”, p.252, Penguin

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

  Charles Dickens

  Heart, Night, Profound

  A Tale of Two Cities bk. 1, ch. 3 (1859)

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  World, Revolution, Rebellious

  Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Cool Memories”, p.85, Verso

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Creativity, Matter

  "The City in History". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter 18, 1961.

  23 Copy quote

  Show source