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

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

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.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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