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

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

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

Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

What is the city but the people?

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.

Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.

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

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?