80 Best San Francisco Quotes About The Golden Gate City
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San Francisco is considered as one of the great cities to live in.
It is expensive and rich due to the tech sector that is currently booming. The proximity to Silicon Valley also contributes towards the popularity of the city.
"Gold in Peace, Iron in War" is the motto of San Francisco. It is special because of the allure of the Golden Gate and the Bay Area. The city is considered amongst the top ones in tourism, technology and overall standard of living. Here, you will find the best quotes that people have shared about this city.
If you like this article about San Francisco Quotes, you may also want to check our other quotes articles: [America quotes] and California quotes.
Best San Francisco Quotes
Here are San Francisco quotes for captions and some funny quotes about San Francisco:
1. "If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life."
- William Saroyan.
2. “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
- Mark Twain.
3. "It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco."
- Oscar Wilde.
4. "San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all that thing you people are doing to it and still look beautiful."
- Frank Lloyd Wright.
5. "The Bay Area is so beautiful, I hesitate to preach about heaven while I’m here."
- Billy Graham.
6. “San Francisco has only one drawback – It is hard to leave.”
– Rudyard Kipling.
7. "San Francisco is poetry. Even the hills rhyme."
- Pat Montandon.
8. "Once I knew the city very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris."
- John Steinbeck.
9. "Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me."
- Anthony Bourdain.
10. "There is more grace per square foot in San Francisco than any place on earth."
- Fulton J. Sheen.
11. "San Francisco is a city with the assets of a metropolis without the disadvantages of size and industry."
- Jack Kenny.
12. “San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.”
- Cecil Beaton.
13. “Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome boy; in San Francisco in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather.”
- Mark Twain.
14. “If free speech and individuality are American characteristics, there is no place more American than San Francisco.”
- Desi Del Valle.
15. "The extreme geniality of San Francisco's economic, intellectual and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States."
- James A. Michener.
16. "In San Francisco, our businesses, healthcare services, workforce, and housing will always be open to all."
- London Breed.
17. “Cities are like gentlemen, they are born, not made. I bet San Francisco was a city from the very beginning.”
- Will Rogers.
18. “San Francisco is a complex town that lets you be yourself, that accepts you even if your family doesn't."
- Jack Boulaware.
San Francisco Travel Quotes
Traveling here can make you look around and say wow! Check out these travel quotes.
19. “It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
- Oscar Wilde.
20. " I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts."
- John Steinbeck.
21. "San Francisco always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world."
- Duke Ellington.
22. "That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for a trip to San Francisco… And the beautiful old houses and the strange light. We’ve never been in a city with light like this."
- John Lennon.
23. "Perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the blood conspired to make San Francisco a city of artists."
- William Henry Irwin.
24. "Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. That should describe it."
- Dylan Thomas.
25. "One day if I do go to heaven... I'll look around and say, it ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco."
- Herb Caen.
26. "Money lives in New York. Power sits in Washington. Freedom sips cappuccino in a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco."
- Joe Flower.
27. "It’s the grandest city I saw in America. If everyone acted as the San Franciscans did, there would be hope for settlement of the world’s difficulties."
– Frol Zozlov.
28. “San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home.”
- Benjamin F. Taylor.
29. "San Francisco is exciting, moody, exhilarating. I even love the muted fogs."
- Julie Christie.
30. “You wouldn’t think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes."
- Dylan Thomas.
31. "It’s simply a very romantic place. Just one look at any of those streets, and you couldn’t be anywhere else."
- Julia Child.
32. "San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live."
- Rebecca Solnit.
33. “Every morning in San Francisco was a bit like waking up on the edge of the earth."
- Elizabeth Percer.
Famous San Francisco Quotes
Here are some quotes about California and other famous quotes about San Francisco.
34. "The city had been kind to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency."
- John Steinbeck.
35. “San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus of the world – one of the really urbane communities in the United States.”
36. “I’m just mad for San Francisco. It is like London and Paris stacked on top of each other.”
- Twiggy.
37. "San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth."
- William Saroyan.
38. “Anyone is fortunate to live here. If I were your president, I would levy a tax on you for living in San Francisco."
- Mikhail Gorbachev.
39. "I love San Francisco. It's by the sea, there's a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there."
- Brian Eno.
40. "A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak dark grays — such a city is San Francisco."
- Herb Caen.
41. "Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady."
- Norman Mailer.
42. "I can walk down the streets of San Francisco, and here I’m normal."
- Robin Williams.
43. "Every man should be allowed to love two cities, his own and San Francisco."
- Gene Fowler.
44. "The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills. And all the people are open and friendly.”
- Dylan Thomas.
45. "San Francisco has that moody thing going on, those blues notes wrapped in moisture, an atmosphere that tempers California dreaming and makes life more real.”
- Eric Maisel.
46. "I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved."
- Mark Twain.
47. "Two days in this city is worth two months in New York."
- Robert Menzies.
48. "San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality."
- Paul Kanter.
49. "East is East, and West is San Francisco."
- O. Henry.
50. “But I would rather be with you, somewhere in San Francisco on a back porch in July, just looking up to Heaven, at this crescent in the sky.”
- Robert Hunter.
51. “That, my dear detective, was the other San Francisco. You’ve probably seen it before, just out of the corner of your eye. You’ve probably dismissed it all your life.”
- Laura Oliva.
52. "If you have to be a one-hit wonder, then San Francisco is the one to have."
- Scott McKenzie.
53. "If I am elected, I'll move the White House to San Francisco."
- Robert Kennedy.
54. "What I like best about San Francisco is San Francisco."
- Frank Lloyd.
55. "San Francisco is one of the only cities I like to visit."
- LeRoy Neiman.
56. "I prefer a wet San Francisco to a dry Manhattan."
- Larry Geraldi.
57. “When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco the City. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it."
- John Steinbeck.
58. "If you’re going to San Francisco, you’re gonna meet some gentle people there."
- John Phillips.
59. “I don’t think San Francisco needs defending.”
- Doris Lessing.
Golden Gate Quotes
Are you looking for a Golden Gate bridge quote? Here are a few.
60. “The Golden Gate Bridge's daily showcase from enveloping stoles of mist to full glory is still the most provocative show in town."
- Mary Moore Mason.
61. "This gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed.”
- John Steinbeck.
62. "The culture of this city is like no other. Many important men and women have made the Golden City their home because they fell in love with it."
- Mike O’Halloran.
63. "Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate..."
- Robert Frost.
64. “This bridge needs neither praise, eulogy nor encomium. It speaks for itself. We who have labored long are grateful. What Nature rent asunder long ago, man has joined today.”
- J. Strauss.
65. “The Golden Gate Bridge should be understood symbolically, in the sense that it does not go from America back to America but that it should be something that could possibly open up out of America.”
- Simeon Wade.
66. "To this day, the city of San Francisco remains to the Chinese the Great City of the Golden Mountains."
- Kai Fu Shah.
67. "I left my heart at the Golden Gate in San Francisco."
- Tony Bennett.
68. "And the sun shines on the bay."
- Journey, 'Lights'.
69. "To this Gate I give the name of Chrysopylae, or Golden Gate, for the same reason that the harbor of Byzantium was called Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn.”
- Capt. John C. Fremont.
70. "What has been thus played up in the form of Golden Gate should not be let down in color.”
- Irving Morrow.
71. "I have known her for 15 years, and she is more beautiful than ever."
- Dean Jennings.
72. "Up in the San Francisco, where the forest meets the bridge."
- Foxygen.
73. "We crossed the famed Golden Gate Bridge, which you may know best from the opening credits of Full House, and also every bit of visual media that wanted to make clear that it takes place in San Francisco."
- Thomm Quackenbush.
Movie Quotes About San Francisco
Here are some San Francisco sayings right from the movies.
74. "It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco."
- Jack Kerouac, 'On The Road'.
75. “The San Francisco skyline sparkles in the distance, the bay spread out before it like a shark-infested welcome mat.”
- T.T. Monday, 'Double Switch'.
76. "San Francisco values did not come into the world with flowers in their hair; they were born howling, in work and strife."
- David Talbot, 'Season Of The Witch'.
77. "Her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time."
- Jack Kerouac, 'On The Road'.
78. “Sometimes it was hard to breathe, knowing how small my world could be. Maybe in San Francisco it wouldn't feel like the universe was conspiring to keep me in a bubble.”
- Heather Demetrios, 'I'll Meet You There'.
79. “I was born and raised in San Francisco, which explains my willingness to stay in a city that's historically been full of people who insist on trying to kill me at the slightest provocation.”
- Seanan McGuire, 'Once Broken Faith'.
80. "The Golden Gate Bridge ... offers enduring proof that human beings can alter the planet with reverence."
- Kevin Starr, 'Golden Gate'.
Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for the article on San Francisco quotes then why not take a look at Texas quotes, or Alaska quotes?
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Master of Arts specializing in Mass Communication/Media Studies
Srija ChandaMaster of Arts specializing in Mass Communication/Media Studies
An aspiring media professional, Srija is currently pursuing her Master's degree in Mass Communication at St. Xavier's University, Kolkata, after completing her degree in journalism. With experience in PR and social media, she has also honed her leadership skills through her participation in a youth parliament. Srija's interests include devouring books, watching movies, and exploring new places through travel.
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