A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
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A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening...
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We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.
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The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
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Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
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If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.
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The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.
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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. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
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We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.
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Cities are ... distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.
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There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.
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Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
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Commuter -- one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; And man who shaves and takes a train, and then rides back to shave again.
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I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.
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This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
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The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
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All great art is born of the metropolis.
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An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
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The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.
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How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
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No other city in the U.S. can divest the visitor of so much money with so little enthusiasm. In Dallas, they take away with gusto; in New Orleans, with a bow; in San Francisco, with a wink and a grin. In New York, you're lucky if you get a grunt.
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The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.
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We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.
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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.
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I found Rome brick, I left it marble.
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All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.
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One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
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The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea
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The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
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