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Quotations about Cities
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim. ~Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins, 1922
Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I offer my verses... chiefly to the denizens of our big Mammon-worshipping cities, in the hope that they may help to lighten the burden of "Sordid Wealth" that weighs so heavily on tens of thousands. If they should be the means of leading one here and there with a lighter heart and keener perception into Nature's fair domain—there to gather imperishable treasures from the lovely blossoms that kiss the clear brooks and mountain wells, or that smile up to us from our country lanes and bypaths—I shall have done my little to check the Nature-forgetting tendencies of city life. ~James Rigg, "Preface," Wild Flower Lyrics and Other Poems, 1897
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men...
~John Milton
What is the city but the people? ~William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, c.1607 [III, 1, Sicinius Velutus]
The summer and the country... have no charms for me. I look forward anxiously to the return of bad weather, coal fires, and good society in a crowded city. I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave. ~Sydney Smith, 1838
"Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man... ~Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, translated from French by Kendall Warren
Beyond my roofs and chimney piles
Sunset crumbles, ragged, dire;
The roaring street is hung for miles
With fierce electric fire.
Shrill and high, newsboys cry
The gross of the planet's destiny
Through one more sullen gyre.
~William Vaughn Moody, "In New York," Gloucester Moors and Other Poems, 1901
There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self. ~Ben Hecht
For the spell of... cities has woven around you, and mastered your blood,
And filled you with needs and desires from which ye shall never go free.
~Arthur Davison Ficke, The Breaking of Bonds: A Drama of the Social Unrest, 1910
God made the country, and man made the town. ~William Cowper
The Town is merely the Country with its hat on. ~Kenneth Alfred Evelyn Alexander (c.1890–1953), in The New Zealand Railways Magazine, 1930 January 1st [His entries were always credited "Perpetrated and Illustrated by Ken Alexander."
Town and country, country and town,
Equally excellent sons of a noun...
~Kenneth Alfred Evelyn Alexander (c.1890–1953), in The New Zealand Railways Magazine, 1930 January 1st
What is this world but our secret natures opened and stamped into cities? ~James Oppenheim, "The Millennium," Songs for the New Age, 1914
Starless and still…
Who stopped this heart?
Who bound this city in a trance?
~James Oppenheim, "Washington Square," Songs for the New Age, 1914
I'm not a city person... I love the country, dogs, flowers and nature, and I'm very bored by cement and skyscrapers. ~Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993)
Besides, there is something about society and life in the city that oppresses me, a procedure of obliteration. The air is polluted, the backfire of cars is reminiscent of guns, and the noise is so bad you can't hear properly. ~Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993)
...vast and gloomy cities vomit their poisonous breath. ~Edward Howard Griggs, "Time Sweeps On," 1898
...the poisonous germs and pollutions of the city, its impure air and water, bad sewerage and endless nuisances... ~F. J. Groner, M.D., "Health Hints," 1889
I'm scared of it all, God's truth! so I am;
It's too big and brutal for me.
My nerve's on the raw and I don't give a damn
For all the "hoorah" that I see.
I'm pinned between the subway and overhead train,
Where automobiles swoop down:
Oh, I want to go back to the timber again —
I'm scared of the terrible town.
~Robert W. Service, "I'm Scared of It All," 1912
One can be more alone in London than in a desert if one chooses. ~Marie Corelli (Mary Mills Mackay)
I went to London
With a penny or two,
And when I came home
I had nothing for you
But a tale of the city
Of wantons, and strife
And deep in my pocket
A fragment of life.
~H. D. Rothschild, "Londontown"
The clocks in Westbourne-upon-Sea had already struck eleven; but then that new town was a modern, fast,
There is a great renaissance going on. The flood of brains and imagination from the country to the cities is being stemmed — and a gradually increasing trickle is running in the opposite direction. ~John Seymour, 1977
...I hate the crowded town!
I cannot breathe shut up within its gates!
Air,—I want air, and sunshine, and blue sky,
The feeling of the breeze upon my face,
The feeling of the turf beneath my feet,
And no walls but the far-off mountain-tops.
Then I am free and strong,—once more myself...
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student, 1843
No man can live in the city, indeed no man can undergo the high pressure of modern business in any community, and not get a case of the nerves at least once a year... ~Emerson Hough, Out of Doors, 1915
I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy "the sweet security of streets." The excitement of the crowd is pleasant to me. I find sermons in the stones of the pavement, and in the continuous sound of voices and wheels and footsteps hear the "sad music of humanity"... The green earth, and the air, and the sea, all living and all lifeless things, preach the gospel of a good providence; but most of all does man, in his crowded cities, and in his manifold powers and wants and passions and deeds, preach this same gospel... Architecture, and painting, and sculpture, and music, and epic poems, and all the forms of art, wherein the hand of genius is visible, please me evermore... And thus my sympathies are with men, and streets, and city gates, and towers from which the great bells sound solemnly and slow, and cathedral doors, where venerable statues, holding books in their hands, look down like sentinels upon the church-going multitude, and the birds of the air come and build their nests in the arms of saints and apostles.
And more than all this, in great cities we learn to look the world in the face. We shake hands with stern realities... ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Great Metropolis," 1837
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities tortures...
~Lord Byron
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. ~W. Somerset Maugham, 1900
No poet spent with visions,
Bit by the City's teeth,
Laughing at fortune, seeking
Fame and the singer's wreath,
But must grow brave this evening,
Humming a wilder tune,
Armed against men and nations.
Why? He beholds the moon!
~Vachel Lindsay, "The Moon is a Mirror: What the Young Rhymer Said," 1913
You see how bright the lights are? — they have those horrible bluish neons that illuminate every pore of your skin, your whole soul finally... In the end, everyone looks like a Zombie... ~Jack Kerouac, The Town & The City, 1950
Don't let the city steal your soul. ~Terri Guillemets
To one who has been long in city pent,
'T is very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament...
~John Keats (1795–1821)
Men are made not to be crowded into anthills but to be dispersed over the earth, which they should cultivate; the more they come together, the more they are corrupted, the infirmities of the body, as well as the vices of the soul, are the unfailing effect of this overcrowding. Cities are the abyss of the human species... Send your children... to regain in the midst of the fields the vigor that is lost in the unhealthy air of cities. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), translated by Christopher Kelly, 2009
Out there are roads that roll to cities—
Cities and clocks and the confused many...
~Cave Outlaw (1900–1996), "Muir Woods," Fugitive Hour, 1950
At Rome you long for the country; when you are in the country, ever fickle, you extol the absent city to the skies. ~Horace
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