40+ Best City Quotes That Are Seriously Relatable

Lydia Samson
Dec 12, 2023 By Lydia Samson
Originally Published on Feb 26, 2021
interesting funny quotes for everyone about cities
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Read time: 6.3 Min

Cities around the world have been the center stage for many success stories.

A city is a boon for people who love the hustle and the grind of life. We've collected a bunch of delightful quotes for the city dwellers.

If you want to read more good quotes around this theme to find your quote for the day, then have a look at these New York quotes and building quotes if you don't find it among these city quotes.

Best City Quotes

The streets of a city are always busy and full of life.

Here are some of the coolest quotes about cities.

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

- Cyril Connolly.

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

- Michelangelo.

3. "When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it."

- Seamus Heaney.

4. "The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist-this is essential to the life of a country."

- Margaret Mead.

5. "The city disappears street by street as you enter it."

- Ian Seed.

6. "Cities and human settlements are part of the environment and have been for a long time now."

- Hank Dittmar.

7. "I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, 'There's no place like New York. It's the most exciting city in the world now."

- Robert De Niro.

8. "As an artificial world, the city should be so in the best sense: made by art, shaped for human purposes."

- Kevin Lynch.

9. "A hick town is one in which there is no place to go where you shouldn't be."

- Alexander Woollcott.

10. "We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation."

- John F. Kennedy.

11. "Ant swarming City. City full of dreams. Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve."

- Charles Baudelaire.

12. "The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes.

13. "Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television."

- William Gibson, 'Spook Country'.

14. "As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach."

- Albert Camus.

15. "A city that outdistances man’s walking powers is a trap for man."

- Arnold Joseph Toynbee.

16. "These technologies reshaped the physical aspects of living in cities – how far a person could travel or how high a building could climb."

- Christian Madera.

17. "New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move."

- David Letterman.

18. "The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity."

- Lewis Mumford.

19. "You cannot take it as a fait accompli that the city's going to come back."

- Mitch Landrieu.

20. "The pressure of survival in the big city will make you lose sight of your dream... Hang in there."

- James De La Vega.

21. "The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families."

- Malcolm Gladwell.

Profound City Quotes

Here are some powerful quotes about cities.

22. "Seasons change. So do cities. People come into your life and people go, but it's comforting to know: the ones you love are always in your heart. And if you're very lucky, a plane ride away."

- Michael Patrick King.

23. "A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again."

- Margaret Mead.

24. "Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad."

- Roman Payne, 'Cities & Countries'.

25. "What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters."

- Charles Baudelaire.

26. "There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city."

- Kathleen Norris.

27. "What is the city but the people?"

- William Shakespeare.

28. "The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art."

- Lewis Mumford.

29. "An architect should live as little in cities as a painter."

- John Rushkin.

30. "Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity."

- Roman Payne, 'Cities & Countries'.

31. "All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim."

- Christopher Morley.

32. "The movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth."

- Rainer Maria Rilke.

33. "There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars."

- Hubert Selby Jr., 'Requiem for a Dream'.

34. "A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one."

- Aristotle.

35. "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."

- Jane Jacobs, ' The Death and Life of Great American Cities'.

36. "In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy."

- Neal Shusterman.

37. "A city is a place where interesting always beats beautiful."

- Megan Harlan, 'Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays'.

38. "If you love nature, stay the heck away from it. Live in a city, the denser the better."

- Jeff Speck.

39. "City’s just a jungle; more games to play

Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away."

- Bob Dylan.

40. "In Rome you long for the country; in the country – oh inconstant! – you praise the distant city to the stars."

- Horace.

41. "Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not."

- Georgia O'Keeffe.

42. "A city is a large community where people are lonesome together."

- Herbert Prochnow.

43. "What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city."

- Coriolanus III.

44. "There's something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave."

- Charlotte Eriksson.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for city quotes then why not take a look at bridge quotes, or [funny quotes for kids].

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Written by Lydia Samson

Bachelor in Science specializing in Mass Communication

Lydia Samson picture

Lydia SamsonBachelor in Science specializing in Mass Communication

A diligent and driven mass communications graduate from Caleb University, Lydia has experience in media and a passion for digital marketing and communications. She is an effective communicator and team-builder with strong analytical, management, and organizational skills. She is a self-starter with a positive, can-do attitude.

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