Quotes about life

"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. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know."

Mead, Margaret on life   

"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."

Mead, Margaret on life   

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

Michelangelo on life   

"The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph."

Miller, Henry on life   

"America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub."

Mills, C. Wright on life   

"Either these [unsaved] people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known."

Moody, Dwight L. on life   

"New York, the nation's thyroid gland."

Morley, Christopher on life   

"The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo."

Morris, Desmond on life   

"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."

Mumford, Lewis on life   

"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."

Mumford, Lewis on life   

"An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris."

Nietzsche, Friedrich on life   

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

Norris, Kathleen on life   

"Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man."

Oppenheimer, Martin on life   

"Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down."

Orben, Robert on life   

"Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another."

Plato on life   

"All great art is born of the metropolis."

Pound, Ezra on life   

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

Prochnow, Herbert on life   

"Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast."

Proverb, Italian on life   

"Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture."

Raban, Jonathan on life   

"Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle."

Rilke, Rainer Maria on life   

"I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change."

Ruskin, John on life   

"Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles."

Santayana, George on life   

"There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears."

Seattle, Chief on life   

"New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it."

Simon, Neil on life   

"In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman."

Spengler, Oswald on life   

"All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome."

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius on life   

"City life is millions of people being lonesome together."

Thoreau, Henry David on life   

"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."

Whitman, Walt on life   

"A great city is that which has the greatest men and women."

Whitman, Walt on life   

"Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide."

Whittier, John Greenleaf on life   

"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."

Wilde, Oscar on life   

"One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years."

Wolfe, Thomas on life   

"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."

Wordsworth, William on life   

"The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy."

Wright, Frank Lloyd on life   

"To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor."

Wright, Frank Lloyd on life   

"Chop the slop!"

Torley on life   

"He who would travel happily must travel light "

de saint Exupery, Antoine on life   

""we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give"."

Churchill, Winston on life
4 fans of this quote   

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."

Capote, Truman on life   

"In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find "the ultimate questioner" - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question."

Joshi, Kedar on life