Article image

15 Quotes Any City Slicker Will Appreciate

Big cities have a special allure. The vibrant energy, diverse cultures, and seemingly endless possibilities make them a preferred tourist destination — and an exciting place to live. The unspoken promise of opportunity and unforgettable moments makes big cities feel irresistible, even if visiting or living there does come with cons to go with the pros.

While they’re often hubs of innovation and ambition, with plenty of options for work or education, the fast-paced lifestyle and the high cost of living can be overwhelming.

The complicated reality of big-city life has long held a prominent place in the minds of thinkers and writers, leading to some influential works over the years. Ernest Hemingway never got over his time in Paris, while urbanist Jane Jacobs’ thoughtful, community-minded approach to city life has had major impacts in some of the biggest cities in the world.

This selection of quotes from the aforementioned figures and others cover everything — the good, the bad, and the beautiful — about big cities and their place in our lives  and imaginations.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
Susanne Katherina Langer

Share Quote

I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighbourhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Share Quote

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

Share Quote

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

Share Quote

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
Joan Didion

Share Quote

A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.
Patrick Geddes

Share Quote

The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.
Sylvia Plath

Share Quote

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
Michelangelo Antonioni

Share Quote

London opens to you like a novel itself … It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passage, door.
Anna Quindlen

Share Quote

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

Share Quote

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

Share Quote

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
Ernest Hemingway

Share Quote

All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound

Share Quote

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.
Rupert Brooke

Share Quote

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, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art.
Lewis Mumford

Share Quote

Featured image credit: ihsanyildizli/ iStock

Author image
About the Author
Nicole Villeneuve
Nicole is a writer, thrift store lover, and group-chat meme spammer based in Ontario, Canada.
Play more header background
Play more icon
Daily Question
Fill in the blank: "___ is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect." - Steve Jobs

More Inspiration

happiness theme icon

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

separator icon
Eudora Welty
motivation theme icon

Attention is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.

separator icon
Iain McGilchrist
hope theme icon

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

separator icon
Joan Didion
love theme icon

A genuinely happy person is one who has rendered others happy.

separator icon
Daisaku Ikeda
wisdom theme icon

Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

separator icon
Martin Luther King Jr.
happiness theme icon

I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than walk alone in the light.

separator icon
Helen Keller
motivation theme icon

I found my place when I stopped looking for it.

separator icon
Mahershala Ali
hope theme icon

In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

separator icon
Carl Sagan
love theme icon

You make your life meaningful by applying meaning to it.

separator icon
Sheila Heti
wisdom theme icon

From our first babblings to our last word, we make but one statement, and that is our life.

separator icon
Richard Paul Evans
happiness theme icon

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

separator icon
Franz Kafka