Cities quotes
4.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside cities — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"It doesn't matter if you come from the inner city. People who fail in life are people who find lots of excuses. It's never too late for a person to recognize that they have potential in themselves."
"you've got to burn straight up and down and then maybe sidewise for a while and have your guts scrambled by a bully and the demonic ladies, you've got to run along the edge of madness teetering, you've got to starve like a winter alleycat, you've go to live with the imbecility of at least a dozen cities, then maybe maybe maybe you might know where you are for a tiny blinking moment."
"There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city."
"In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success."
"New Orleans is the only city in the world you go in to buy a pair of nylon stockings they want to know your head size."
"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities."
"A city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence."
"Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?... A gang is a group of men... in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy... acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues people, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of kingdom."
"Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places."
"Poverty has, in large cities, very different appearances; it is often concealed in splendour, and often in extravagance."
"Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happyas possible."
"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."
"Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse."
"Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people - but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them - or more, a comment upon their lives - or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives."
"LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities."
"I grew up on Don Knotts and Jerry Lewis and all the guys from Second City."
"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand"
"I wander though China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokoyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi... all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn't a place for me."
"As a planning board commissioner, I have to review the applications for development throughout the city, and the bulk of those applications have been for the waterfront. I think the progress the waterfront has made is amazing."
"You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have."
