City Life Quotes - Page 2

• As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

  Albert Camus

  Life, Mean, Cities

  Albert Camus (1978). “Notebooks, 1935-1942”, Harcourt

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

  Lewis Mumford

  Running, Art, Nature

  "The Culture of Cities". Book by Lewis Mumford. Introduction, 1938.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?

  Neil Gaiman

  Girl, Home, Cities

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Cities

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

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson no one learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of responsibility for you.

  Jane Jacobs

  Responsibility, Successful, Cities

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.82, Vintage

  243 Copy quote

  Show source

• But look what we have built ... This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Looks, Vandalism

  The Death and Life of Great American Cities introduction (1961)

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Country, Art, School

  Margaret Mead, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1979). “Margaret Mead, some personal views”, Angus & Robertson

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• When in Rome, do as Rome does.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Rome, Cities, Doe

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Cities, Atmosphere

  Charles Baudelaire, Jonathan Mayne (1981). “Art in Paris 1845-1862: salons and other exhibitions”

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

  Christopher Morley

  New York, Cities, Literature

  15 Copy quote

• Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

  Irving Berlin

  Music, New York, East Berlin

  "Vogue" Magazine, November 1, 1962.

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

  Italo Calvino

  Cities, Shapes, Ends

  16 Copy quote

• 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 moveable feast.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Life, Travel, Men

  A Moveable Feast epigraph (1964).

  93 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.

  John Berger

  Sex, Cities, Age

  1987 In The Guardian, 27 Mar.

  21 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, Cities

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

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cities, Able, Life Is

  Aldous Huxley (1961). “Selected Essays”

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

  John Berger

  Sex, Teenager, Believe

  John Berger (2011). “Keeping a Rendezvous”, p.101, Vintage

  62 Copy quote

  Show source

• Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Fashion, Ebb And Flow, Cities

  John Greenleaf Whittier (2012). “The Works of Whittier, Volume III (of VII) Anti-Slavery Poems and Songs of Labor and Reform”, p.95, tredition

  63 Copy quote

  Show source

• Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Ocean, Cities, Swamps

  D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton (2000). “The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence”, p.17, Cambridge University Press

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

  John Ciardi

  Neighborhood, Areas

  7 Copy quote

• The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

  Fred Allen

  Humorous, Cities, Paris

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Cities, Looks

  Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (1995). “1949-1959”, Rizzoli International Publications

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.

  Le Corbusier

  Beautiful, New York, Design

  23 Copy quote

• We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

  John F. Kennedy

  Cities, Neglect, Peril

  Kennedy, John F. (1963). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1962”, p.78, Best Books on

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  New York, Moving, Cities

  "Late Show with David Letterman", February 9, 1984.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source