City Life Quotes - Page 4

• London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

  Henry James

  London, Form, Metropolis

  Henry James (2016). “Henry James: Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others / Notes of a Son and Brother / The Middle Years / Other Writings: Library of America #274”, p.992, Library of America

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• Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Men, Thinking

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• There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

  Don Herold

  New York, Cities, Sophistication

  Don Herold (1926). “There ought to be a law--”

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• In Amsterdam, the river and canals have been central to city life for the last four centuries.

  Janet Echelman

  Cities, Rivers, Four

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• Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

  Jane Jacobs

  Sweet, Valentine, Play

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.112, Vintage

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• I rather wonder what I am doing here. I enjoy city life, you know. The glittering lights, the constant companionship, the liquid entertainment. The lack of sudden monkeys.

  Cassandra Clare

  Light, Cities, Monkeys

  Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan (2013). “What Really Happened in Peru”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

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• I grew up in a middle class English family just outside London. I wasn't surrounded by that speedy city lifestyle, it was a little mellower.

  Ed Westwick

  Class, Cities, Littles

  "Ed Westwick: 'I can be a real bitch - people know when to stay away'". Interview with Mirror.co.uk, www.mirror.co.uk. May 3, 2009.

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• I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.

  Stone Gossard

  Running, Thinking, Cities

  "From Ticketmaster to Trees: An Interview With Pearl Jam Guitarist Stone Gossard". Interview with Scott Thill, www.wired.com. Ocotober 17, 2008.

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• Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity.

  Robert Fulghum

  Life, Work, Cutting

  Robert Fulghum (2004). “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things”, p.57, Ballantine Books

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• One of the saddest sights of the slums is to see the thrifty wife of the working man, with her rosy brood of children, used to country air and sunshine, used to space, privacy, good surroundings, cleanliness, quiet, shut up amid the noise and dirt and confusion, in the gloom of the slum.

  Albion Fellows Bacon

  Country, Children, Sunshine

  Albion Fellows Bacon (1914). “Beauty for Ashes, by Albion Fellows Bacon; with Numerous Illustrations”

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• If, in all the cities, every house that is past repairing could be pulled down or burned up, how great would be the crash, how heaven-high the conflagration. It would be a veritable crack of Doom and glare of the Judgment.

  Albion Fellows Bacon

  Past, Cities, House

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• I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

  Hamlin Garland

  Blessed, Fall, Sunset

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• There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

  Edward Hoagland

  Summer, Cities, Age

  Edward Hoagland (1995). “The Tugman's Passage”

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• I'm always kind of hoping that I'll get a movie that shoots in Alabama so I can go back and kind of get a break from my city life.

  Nolan Gould

  Cities, Alabama, Kind

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• The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself.

  Russell Kirk

  Communication, Character, Men

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• Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Men, Simplicity

  Henry David Thoreau (2006). “Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles”, p.74, Heron Dance Press

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• It deals with so many different aspects of living in South Africa the racial issues of South Africans and Asians with poverty with the reality of children orphaned by AIDS the transition from village life to city life.

  Laura Thielen

  Children, Reality, Cities

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• The conditions of city life may be made healthy, so far as the physical constitution is concerned; but there is connected with the business of the city so much competition, so much rivalry, so much necessity for industry, that I think it is a perpetual, chronic, wholesale violation of natural law. There are ten men that can succeed in the country, where there is one that can succeed in the city.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Country, Men, Thinking

  Henry Ward BEECHER (1862). “Royal Truths, etc”, p.40

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• Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hanging around in candy stores and bars and drinking soda popon stoops, and have passed a judgment, the gist of which is: "This is deplorable! If these people had decent homes and a more private or bosky outdoor place, they wouldn't be on the street!" That judgment represents a profound misunderstanding of cities. It makes no more sense than to drop in at a testimonial banquet in a hotel and conclude that if these people had wives who could cook, they would give their parties at home.

  Jane Jacobs

  Party, Drinking, Home

  Jane Jacobs (1989). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Vintage

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• There are many people of cosmopolitan temperament who are not from the elites of their societies or the world; and while, for a variety of reasons, I think a cosmopolitan spirit does naturally go with city life, that's the life of a very large proportion of human beings today. And I don't think rural people can't be cosmopolitan, in my sense.

  Kwame Anthony Appiah

  Thinking, People, World

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• [Anne, commenting on city life] "I think I would probably come to the conclusion that I'd like it for a while... but in the end, I'd still prefer the sound of the wind in the firs across the brook more than the tinkling of crystal.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Thinking, Wind, Cities

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• You have to understand, now, I'm a momma's boy. I'm from the south. My way of being raised is totally different than the big city life. I truly was a country boy.

  Terry Bradshaw

  Country, Boys, Cities

  "Going Deep with Hall of Fame Quarterback Terry Bradshaw". Interview with Scott Ross, www.cbn.com.

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• Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as
  now,
  The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
  the sight of the wounded,)
  Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
  Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

  Walt Whitman

  Powerful, Eye, Sight

  Walt Whitman (2013). “Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892”, p.280, St. Martin's Press

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• Let the seeking man reach a place where life and lips join to say continually, "Be thou exalted," and a thousand minor problems will be solved at once.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Life, Christian, Men

  "The Pursuit of God". Book by Aiden Wilson Tozer, 1957.

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• Certain kinds of things that the novel used to do, which was, "Oh, I'm living out here in West Nowhere, Nebraska and I'm curious how the upper class in New York City lives, I guess I'll read a novel about it." We don't have to do that now. You just turn on the TV. Turn on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You can get that information anywhere. Novels don't have to do that anymore.

  Jonathan Franzen

  New York, Class, Cities

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 1, 2010.

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