Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.

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

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

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

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

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