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.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads, 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.

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

My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.

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.

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

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. 

What is the city but the people?

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.

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

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

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