150+ City Quotes – Inspirational Quotes About Cities Ideas

Welcome to our collection of Inspirational City Quotes! Cities have a unique energy and allure that captivates people around the world.

In this article, we’ve gathered a delightful array of City Quotes that beautifully encapsulate the spirit of urban living. Whether you’re a seasoned city dweller or a wanderer, these quotes will resonate.

People use these quotes for various purposes – from sharing them on social media to add a touch of urban charm to their posts to using them as mantras for motivation and embracing cities’ vibrant possibilities.

Join us on this inspiring journey through cities’ wisdom and charisma.

Best City Quotes

I travel continuously, and I see many cities, but there is nowhere like London. – Norman Foster

 

Paris is always a good idea. – Audrey Hepburn

The surface of Venice is constantly metamorphosing [and] painting Venice is almost like being a restorer, peeling off the layers to find the picture after picture underneath. –  Arbit Blatas

 

Men who are too good looking are never good in bed because they never had to be. – Carrie

 

A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life. – Thomas Jefferson

 

Calcutta’s the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat. – Tahir Shah

 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

 

The city’s enthusiasm to do great things without territoriality. — Maxwell L. Anderson

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it. – Dorothy Parker

 

Give him alms, woman, because there is nothing sadder in life than being blind in Granada. – Francisco de Icaza

 

I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle. – Jack Kerouac

 

When I’m in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing, like I’m in a movie. – Ryan Adams

 

Maybe We Can Be Each Other’s, Soul Mates. And Then We Can Let Men Be Just These Great, Nice Guys To Have Fun With. – Charlotte

 

I said no white, no ivory, no nothing that says virgin. I have a child. The jig is up. — Miranda Hobbes

Some people are settling down, some people are settling and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.  – Carrie

 

Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward. – Maxwell Maltz

 

When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere – wherever people are living out their lives. It’s a city with a million centers.- Elizabeth Gilbert

 

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast – Ernest Hemingway

 

The commitment of cities to set targets to reduce their own carbon footprint and also to deploy five large scale ICT pilots for cities before 2015 is truly inspiring. – Neelie Kroes

 

I’ve spent $40,000 on shoes and I have no place to live? I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes! – Carrie Bradshaw

 

We made a deal ages ago… men, babies, it doesn’t matter. We’re soulmates. – Samantha

 

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast. – Italian Proverb

I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love. – Carrie

 

Dirt is an inert substance that holds up plants. Soil is a system. – Chad Adams

 

Now there’s a grown-up swinging town. – Frank Sinatra

 

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one. – Aristotle

 

If you want your subordinates to do or not do certain things, build a city. – Niccolò Machiavelli

 

I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities. – Donald Barthelme

 

City life is millions of people being lonesome together. – Henry David Thoreau

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.  –  John Ruskin

 

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation. – John F. Kennedy

 

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.  -Philip G. Hamerton

 

Towered cities please us then, And the busy hum of men. – JOHN MILTON

 

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.  – Coriolanus

 

There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave. ― Charlotte Eriksson

 

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters. ― Charles Baudelaire

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. – Georgia O’Keeffe

 

My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus, they’ve become a Londoner.– Ben Aaronovitch

 

Paris is the only city in the world that starving to death still considered art. – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

 

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go. –  Truman Capote

 

To know Paris is to know a great deal. – Henry Miller

 

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn’t died. It hadn’t done much, but it had gone on. – V.S Naipul

 

The people: We are brash, bold, good-spirited and hell-bent for leather. — Lucy Billingsley

 

Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. – John Steinbeck

Granada is so moving that it stimulates and melts all of the senses. – Henri Matisse

 

Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city. –Dorothy Parker

 

If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe. – Ellen R. Shapiro

 

Being single used to mean that nobody wanted you. Now it means you’re pretty sexy and you’re taking your time deciding how you want your life to be and who you want to spend it with. – Carrie

 

Everybody has talent, it’s just a matter of moving around until you’ve discovered what it is. – George Lucas

 

I found that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life’s greatest secret pleasures. – Elizabeth Gilbert

 

Just add three letters to Paris, and you have paradise. ― Jules Renard

 

The 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities. – Wellington E. Webb

Honey, what’s the point of being in the suburbs if you’re not going to fuck a gardener? – Samantha Jones

 

No matter who broke your heart or how long it takes to heal, you’ll never get through it without your friends. – Carrie

 

I’ve been in many of them and to some extent, I would have to say this: If you’ve seen one city slum you’ve seen them all. – Spiro T. Agnew

 

F— me badly once, shame on you. F— me badly twice, shame on me. – Samantha

 

As a farmer, I am educated daily and wowed in a good way and in a bad way. – Tony D’Orazio

 

If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life. –  William Saroyan

 

A hick town is one in which there is no place to go where you shouldn’t be. – Alexander Woollcott

 

We need to draw lines in the ground and say, ‘The concrete stops here.’ That forces people to build in and up, rather than out – and there’s nothing wrong with high, dense urban environments as long as they’re planned correctly. They can be extremely livable. They tend to require less transportation, fewer sewer lines, fewer power lines, fewer roads, and more tightly packed structures, which in and of themselves are more energy efficient. –  Patrick Moore

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls. – Robert Walser

 

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. – Margaret Mead

 

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.  – Le Corbusier

 

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

 

All cities are mad:  but the madness is gallant.  All cities are beautiful:  but the beauty is grim.  -Christopher Morley

 

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. – JANE JACOBS

 

We do not look at our great cities for our best morality. – Jane Austen

 

Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others. ― Charlotte Eriksson

I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it. ― Truman Capote

 

It is true that the king has made a truce with the duke of Burgundy for fifteen days and that the duke is to turn over the city of Paris at the end of fifteen days. Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly. – Joan of Arc

 

A bad day in London is still better than a good day anywhere else. – Anon

 

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris. – Gustave Flaubert

 

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius. – Alexander Herzen

 

You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights. I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.  – Owen Wilson

 

Calcutta is not for everyone. You want your city clean and green, stick to Delhi. You want your city rich and impersonal, go to Bombay. You want them hi-tech and full of draught beer, Bangalore’s your place. But if you want a city with a soul, come to Calcutta. – Vir Sanghvi

 

The can-do attitude. You see it in all walks of life. — Cindy Rachofsky

There’s something so romantic about being broke in New York. You gotta do it. You have to live there once without any money, and then you have to live there when you have money. Let me tell you, of the two, the latter is far better.  – Amy Poehler

 

Granada; more dazzling than the flower and more flavourful than the fruit it is named after, like a virgin lying in the sun. – Alejandro Dumas

 

Tip the world over on its side and everything lose will land in Los Angeles. – Frank Lloyd Wright

 

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. – Simone de Beauvoir

 

You shouldn’t have to sacrifice who you are just because somebody else has a problem with it. – Carrie

 

Change is a great and horrible thing, and people love it or hate it at the same time. Without change, however, you just don’t move. –Marc Jacobs

 

Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love—at least as far as I’ve always witnessed. -Elizabeth Gilbert

 

There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris. — Ernest Hemingway

 

I know your friends just fine. Charlotte is the brunette, Miranda is the redhead, and Samantha is in trouble. – Mr. Big

 

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.  – Fred A. Allen

 

We need to center design on people. What’s the good in sustainable materials if you’re using them to make a prison? – Tommy Joshua

 

Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me. You go there as a snarky New Yorker thinking it’s politically correct, it’s crunchy granola, it’s vegetarian, and it surprises you every time. It’s a two-fisted drinking town, a carnivorous meat-eating town, it’s dirty and nasty and wonderful. – Anthony Bourdain

We might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who had determined what the law insists on laying it down to others. – Louis Kronenberger

 

I’ve often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than when we leave it to the engineers. – William O. Douglas

 

The Old City of Jerusalem is in our hands. – Moshe Dayan

 

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo. – Desmond Morris

 

I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday. – Raymond Chandler

 

A city that outdistances man’s walking powers is a trap for man. – Arnold J. Toynbee

 

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Ant-swarming city, a city abounding in dreams, Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby! -CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

 

Cities are murky places–hatching grounds for monsters. – John Geddes

 

If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple. ― Vera Nazarian

 

Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light? Or just another lost angel… City of Night? ― Jim Morrison

 

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. – Seamus Heaney

 

In London, love and scandal are considered the best sweeteners of tea. – John Osborne

 

Cities have sex: London is a man, Paris is a woman, and New York City a well-adjusted transsexual. -Angela Carter

 

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. – Erica Jon

 

We’ll always have Paris.  – Howard Koch

 

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world ‘another Calcutta. – Bharti Mukherjee

 

You can make something of yourself in this town, and people will let you do that. — Dean Fearing

 

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. – James Baldwin

 

The truth is, that I’m beginning to wonder if there is any greater pleasure in life than visiting Granada. …and it is going back and visiting it again. – Alejandro Dumas

 

Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang’s feeble imagination. – Henry Miller

 

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. – Agatha Christie

 

Life gives you lots of chances to screw up which means you have just as many chances to get it right.  – Carrie

 

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.  – Benjamin Franklin

 

Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live. – Elizabeth Gilbert

 

To be a Parisian is not about being born in Paris, it is about being reborn there. — Sacha Guitry

 

He has one ball, and I have a lazy ovary! In what twisted world does that create a baby? It’s like the Special Olympics of conception. – Miranda Hobbes

 

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi. – Fred A. Allen

 

Resilience is hard to finance. Hospitals, data centers — they have backups. – Kevin Wright

 

San Francisco has only one drawback: ‘it’s hard to leave. – Rudyard Kipling

 

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

 

Don’t focus so much on single buildings as fabric. If the fabric is lost, we have a few heroic buildings in parking lots. – Steve Mouzon

 

People going into the cities for the opportunities and the towns are getting older, no young people. -Rachel Griffiths

 

What I like about cities is that everything is king-size, the beauty and the ugliness. – Joseph Brodsky

 

I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do.  – Lenny Bruce

 

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

 

What is the city but the people?  – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer. – SINCLAIR LEWIS

 

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.  – William Wordsworth

 

You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system. ― Erol Ozan

 

For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home. ― Simon Van Booy

 

The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city. –  Leon Battista Alberti

 

If you’re curious, London’s an amazing place. – David Bailey

 

When good Americans die, they go to Paris. – Oscar Wilde

 

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him. -Arthur Symons

 

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation. – G. K. Chesterson

 

Calcutta is like another world. People, there are very special and grateful. – Penelope Cruz

 

I love the ballsiness of it all, how Dallas goes for it. — Todd Fiscus

 

Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place. – Johnny Carson

 

If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture – not only national culture but global culture. – Barbara Kruger

 

More than anything else New York is a city of superlatives, a place where the best, the brightest, the biggest is the norm. – Marilyn J. Appleberg

 

I will not be judged by you or society. – Samantha

 

If your world doesn’t allow you to dream, move to one where you can.  – Billy Idol

 

Love is like that is a deep well with steep sides. Once you fall in, that’s it. You will love that person always. – Elizabeth Gilbert

 

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself. — Jeffrey Eugenides

 

I found Rome brick, I left it marble. – Caesar Augustus

 

You have to try things without knowing whether or not they’ll work in order to innovate. – Hari M. Osofsky

 

I can walk down the streets of San Francisco, and here I’m normal. – Robin Williams

 

As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach. – Albert Camus

 

Stop texting me saying you’re having a city planning emergency. There’s no such thing as a city planning emergency. –  Mark Brendanawicz

 

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. – P. D. JAMES

 

The smallest patch of green to arrest the monotony of asphalt and concrete is as important to the value of the real estate as streets, sewers and convenient shopping. – James Felt

 Read More: Rain Quotes

There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self.   – Ben Hecht

Thanks for reading. Let these City Quotes infuse your life with urban inspiration. Embrace the wisdom and charm of cities through these powerful words. Share, reflect, and keep the essence of urban living alive in your heart.