Cities Quotes

... something wholly new in religious thought. All other heavens have been gardens, dreamlands: passivities, more or less aimless. Even to the majority among ourselves, heaven is a siesta and not a city.The heaven of Christianity is different from all other heavens, because the religion of Christianity is different from all other religions. Christianity is the religion of cities. It moves among real things. Its sphere is the street, the market-place, the working life of the world... Try to restore the natural force of the expression - suppose John to have lived today and to have said 'I saw a new London.

~ Henry Drummond

Lying flat on my back, with my toes dipped into the lake, I stared at the stars for a second. I guess I should have pondered their beauty and realized the rarity of a sky unsaturated by city lights, or something. But it occurred to me that you could probably see stars from the vast majority of the earth. It was city lights that were actually rare.

~ Emily Adrian

Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

~ Bill Bryson

In cities it is useless to look at the stars or to describe them, worship them, or seek direction from them. When lost, one should follow the tracks of the camels.

~ Rawi Hage

All around us, Karachi kept moving

~ Kamila Shamsie

In cities where peace and the arts flourish, men are more consumed by jealousy, worry, and anxiety than they are in cities under the blight of a besieging army. Private sorrows are more bitter than public suffering.

~ Voltaire

For when man is faced with a curse he answers, I'll take care of my problems. And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates the arts and the sciences, he raises an army, he constructs chariots, he builds cities. The spirit of might is a response to the divine curse.

~ Jacques Ellul

Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.

~ Jonathan Franzen

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

~ Clay Shirky

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the market put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?

~ Arundhati Roy

Some places will, however, be left behind. Not every city will succeed, because not every city has been adept at adapting to the age of information, in which ideas are the ultimate creator of wealth.

~ Edward Glaeser

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.

~ Emma Jane Unsworth

Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors. We certainly did not evolve to live in cities with millions of people where we bump into strangers everyone we go, are threatened by them in dark streets, sit next to them in the bus, and give them the finger in traffic jams.

~ Frans De Waal

It all fell away then – the control, the independence . . . everything. She had known it would never be easy to findsolitude . . . to find herself. Not in this city, where appearances were everything; where emptiness filled luxurious landscapes till there was nothing but hollow splendor…She hated the pretense.More than hatred, she was frightened of it.

~ Umair Naeem

When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.

~ Jane Jacobs

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.

~ Terry Pratchett

Mind you, Thunder Bay has a lot of outskirts. It's actually two cities melded together, so in a sense it has twice as many outskirts as other places. It's understandable that we got lost....

~ Paul Quarrington

There are some cities in the world, they would have looked much more beautiful had they never been a city and İstanbul is such a city!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It is always easy to create an ordinary city; what is difficult is to create an extraordinary one, peaceful and restful one, smart and tidy, artful and cultivated one, in short, a livable one! And Zurich is such a city!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.

~ John Steinbeck

There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the

~ Iain M. Banks

There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that technology, which was supposed to cut the ties between people and places and allow people everywhere to work from almost anywhere, turns out to flourish in fairly compact geographic locations.

~ Bruce Katz

It’s hopeless, trying to recruit a stranger to help me find someone who’s a stranger to him. But then again, we are all strangers to ourselves, caught up in the monotony of daily life, stuck in our routines, never really stopping to think about what will happen to us if we fall off track.

~ Shannon Mullen

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

~ Socrates

When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.

~ Robert Ludlum

A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.

~ Roman Payne

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city will someday make.

~ Tod Wodicka

The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographicalcan be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. It has long been said that the desert is monotheistic. Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l’Arbalète conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?

~ Guy Debord

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.

~ Hanif Kureishi

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

~ Joan Didion

We no longer produce laborers, we would rather pray to God to send laborers to come and build our cities

~ Sunday Adelaja

Different cities visit us daily, they exist in the clouds.

~ Antonia Perdu

In his mind, the city, as it awoke from its slumber, seemed to be built on quicksand. The stability was illusory.

~ Liu Cixin

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population of a city or country will just happen to look in the mirror at the same time, and from then on there was a city in the sky, as all cities are if we consider that the sky reaches to the ground, and this city, too, thought it was alive, and the candles walked off by themselves.

~ Cole Swensen

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward off bums or psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has brought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.

~ Francesca Lia Block

She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again.

~ William Gibson

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

~ Victor Hugo

... civilization—a word that simply means living in cities...Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses.

~ Tom Standage