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

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

What is the city but the people?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.