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

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

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.

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there. 

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.