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

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.

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

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.

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

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

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

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

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

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?

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

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 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.