Quotes on cities
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.
Maugham, Somerset
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.
Prochnow, Herbert
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.
Morley, Christopher
What is the city but the people?
Shakespeare, William
God made the country, and man made the town.
Cowper, William
There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.
Hamerton, Philip G.
In Rome you long for the country; in the country - oh inconstant! - you praise the distant city to the stars.
Horace
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Connolly, Cyril
Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
Morris, Desmond
I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighbourhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Suburb: a place that isn't city, isn't country, and isn't tolerable.
McLaughlin, Mignon
Cities are the abyss of the human species.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities.
Varro, Marcus Terentius
Just as language has no longer 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.
Rilke, Rainer Maria