Archive

Quotes

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

—Kathleen Norris, 1931

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

—Cyril Connolly, 1944

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.

—Plato, c. 378 BC

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

—Édouard Manet, c. 1860

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.

—John Winthrop, 1630

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

—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935

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

—Ernst Jünger, 1977

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

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.

—Philip K. Dick, 1972

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

—Euripides, c. 415 BC

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

—Thucydides, 410 BC

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

—D.H. Lawrence, 1908

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.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903