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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

What is the city but the people?