Best 73 quotes in «city life quotes» category

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

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

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal.

A city has no sense, no sentiment, no soul.

A city is a right place to build a business but not a right place to build a home.

A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time

Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which -- or, rather, all the more because -- here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here. Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself.

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

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.

A wealth of research confirms the importance of face-to-face contact. One experiment performed by two researchers at the University of Michigan challenged groups of six students to play a game in which everyone could earn money by cooperating. One set of groups met for ten minutes face-to-face to discuss strategy before playing. Another set of groups had thirty minutes for electronic interaction. The groups that met in person cooperated well and earned more money. The groups that had only connected electronically fell apart, as members put their personal gains ahead of the group’s needs. This finding resonates well with many other experiments, which have shown that face-to-face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction. The very first experiment in social psychology was conducted by a University of Indiana psychologist who was also an avid bicyclist. He noted that “racing men” believe that “the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing reels to pull a cable. In all cases, the kids were supposed to go as fast as they could, but most of them, especially the slower ones, were much quicker when they were paired with another child. Modern statistical evidence finds that young professionals today work longer hours if they live in a metropolitan area with plenty of competitors in their own occupational niche. Supermarket checkouts provide a particularly striking example of the power of proximity. As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ wildly in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks. Statistical evidence also suggests that electronic interactions and face-to-face interactions support one another; in the language of economics, they’re complements rather than substitutes. Telephone calls are disproportionately made among people who are geographically close, presumably because face-to-face relationships increase the demand for talking over the phone. And when countries become more urban, they engage in more electronic communications.

A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights)

But you’re out of another world old kid … You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.

Don’t think that without this or that you can’t be happy. Go ahead and try your best to have what you want, but in the meantime you can still be happy.

City life can manufacture depression with no expiry date

He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life. These struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That was one of the humours of things. The floating population of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not Christminster in a local sense at all.

He was new to London in those days, and he had not liked it. He had not cared for the intensity of the traffic, or the underground trains that were full of a human smell and of people who lit up tipped cigarettes and pushed with their elbows.

I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.

I don't, when I think of a city, think of these people, people with very little who are content with that. That is, I think about poverty and culture and traffic and pollution and crime...

If you aren’t paranoid before you arrive in this city, give it a few weeks and you will soon notice it creeping in, dripping into your subconscious like a leaky tap. The trick is not to give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about you, and if you are in the right frame of mind this can be an easy trick to perform but if not you’ll soon notice that for a city full of people who do a great Stevie Wonder impersonation when it comes to the homeless and beggars and casual violence towards others, wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a cheap suit brings out a sneering, hateful attitude that can have weaker minded individuals locked in their houses for weeks before harassing their doctors for prescriptions of Prozac and Beta blockers just to make it out the front door.

I hear nothing but the hustle and bustle of the city. Cars with flashing lights zip past me. People talk, some loud, some quiet. I whisper to myself. “This is what it’s like to go unnoticed.” I take in a deep breath and inhale the freezing air. It smells like ice here. Ice and cigarettes.

I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.

Humans make a city, but a city makes humans tolerate the intolerable.

In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

In the country one sees only nature's fair works, and one's soul is not saddened by the cruel struggle for mere existence that goes on in the crowded city.

In the modern city life, if you don't have money , you simply don't have life.

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. [...] It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.

It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

It required an enormous amount of energy and time just to do errands like getting groceries. She was always sweaty after she got groceries.

It’s all about having the heart … to leave the city and its false glitter for home if you’ve tried long enough and still can’t make it. I would be a big liar to tell you it’s easy to survive after having left home for years. You’re almost like a child when you return – you are starting from the scratch. But you have to behave like a child too if you’re ready to survive; be ever eager to learn. Get ready to take insults from every village rats set to eat your yams of respect and pride. Toe the line till you settle down properly and begin to understand the ways of the people back home. People would laugh at you at first but when your conditions start improving, everyone would laugh with you. Don’t forget the saying of our people: the same mouth that speaks of evil is the same mouth that speaks of good. It’s the heart to go back not minding the years that have been wasted. That is the secret.

It (urban peacekeeping) was quite a task, requiring a permanent balancing act between communities, each with their own interests, festivals, traditions and historical rivalries imported from the wide-open spaces of the countryside into close quarters.

I was walking along and I'm looking at the tall buildings. And I got to thinking about what Thoreau said: They created a lot of grand palaces here, but they forgot to create the noblemen to put in them.

Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.

Oamenii mergeau pe străzile pietruite, aducând cartierul la viață pentru încă o zi.

Like most cities, London could be a lonely place...

Now everything is done by machines, technology has relieved you of much work. What to do? You become aggressive, you fight, you get angry. Without any reason or rhyme, you become angry – suddenly you flare up. Everybody knows that this is foolish, even you in your cooler moments know that that was foolish. But why did you flare up unnecessarily? The excuse was not enough. The real reason is not that there was some situation; the real reason is you have so much energy, so much petrol overflowing, inflammable, that any moment it can be active. That is why after anger you feel relaxed, after anger you feel a little well-being coming to you.

Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.

One morning, the moon still high in the sky, Peri watched from her window a female student -- wearing earphones, her cheeks flushed -- running through the quad. She herself had tried it a few times back in Istanbul, despite the obstacles the city peppered along her trail. Here it was a privilege, of sorts, not to have to worry about broken pavements, potholes in the roads, sexual harassment, cars that did not slow down -- even at pedestrian crossings. The same day, she bought herself a pair of trainers.

Sa traiesti intr-o cusca cu cinci etaje, unde se umbla si se bocane deasupra capului tau, iar radioul urla din toate partile - e considerat un lucru tare bun. Iar sa traiesti ca un lucrator harnic al pamantului, intr-o bojdeuca lipita cu lut, la marginea stepei - se considera o mare nesansa.

Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.

Se nu er jeg borte fra byens larm og trængsel og aviser og mennesker, jeg er flygtet fra det altsammen fordi det igjen kaldte på mig fra landet og ensomheten hvor jeg er fra. Du skal se det kommer til å gå godt! Tænker jeg og har atter det bedste håp. Ak jeg har gjort en slik flugt før og er atter vendt tilbake til byen. Og atter flyktet.

She loved the way her city always sounded like it was celebrating.

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds.

Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren't at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn't deal with one of those things, or with yourself. The City was so expensive and so grueling sometimes that it was easy to be unsure why you were there. Many were there to make money, money that could largely only be made there, in the long spiny arms of industries that could never grow anywhere else or anywhere smaller. Some people just liked it, its loudness and crowdedness and surprises. Some started there for a reason and then couldn't imagine being anywhere else, but maybe lost track of that reason along the way. Some people had a plan. Some were just chancing it. Either way the months flew by, and over the years you came up with something or you came up with not much.

Sometime we forget to value the small things, that inspire us more than the large! We should learn from daily than planning stupid future.

Streets are like children, David thought; the small ones go to bed first.

Städte lassen sich an ihrem Gang erkennen wie Menschen.

Still he considered playing Pachinko the best investment of his free time, soaking in the local stench and bad breathe of other lonely Japanese people as an alternative way of blending into the colorful local scenes which he yearned to be a part of.

I’m considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I’m miming myself.

The bald girl is emblematic of the problem. The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women - you're tired of all that. Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't.