If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.