Quotes on City Life

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity.

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

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.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

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.

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

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

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.

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

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.

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

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

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

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.

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.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.