A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads, 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.

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there. 

Just as language no longer has 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.

What is the city but the people?

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?