By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCQuotes
The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1962A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
—Aldous Huxley, 1934Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
—D.H. Lawrence, 1908Just 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, 1903The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCThere 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.
—Rumi, c. 1250If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1513A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.
—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?
—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.
—Matthew Hale Smith, 1868The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.
—Édouard Manet, c. 1860It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.
—Thucydides, 410 BC