Quotations about Cities

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks. ~Philip G. Hamerton


All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim. ~Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins


Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men.
~John Milton


What is the city but the people? ~William Shakespeare


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


Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo. ~Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo


Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities. ~Marcus Terentius Varro, De Re Rustica


The roaring street is hung for miles
With fierce electric fire.
~William Vaughan Moody, In New York


There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self. ~Ben Hecht


Suburb: a place that isn't city, isn't country, and isn't tolerable. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
~William Wordsworth


God made the country, and man made the town. ~William Cowper, The Task, 1785


A city is a large community where people are lonesome together. ~Herbert Prochnow


I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighbourhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV


Cities are the abyss of the human species. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile


In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time. ~Somerset Maugham


In Rome you long for the country; in the country - oh inconstant! - you praise the distant city to the stars. ~Horace, Satires