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.

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

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

My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.