New York Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old new york quotes, new york sayings, and new york proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Sometimes, from beyond the skyscrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. Albert Camus
If the planet grows cold, this city will nevertheless have been mankind's warmest moment. Paul Morand
To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying. P.G. Wodehouse
The beautiful city, the city of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts! / The city nested in bays! my city! / The city of such women, I am mad with them! I will return after death to be with them! / The city of such young men, I swear I cannot live happy, without I often go talk, walk, eat, drink, sleep, with them! Walt Whitman
If Paris is the setting for a romance, New York is the perfect city in which to get over one, to get over anything. Here the lost douceur de vivre is forgotten and the intoxication of living takes over. Cyril Connolly
But, ah! Manhattan's sights and sounds, her smells / Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes / From being of her a part, her subtle spells, her slums— / Oh God! the stark unutterable pity, / To be dead, and never again behold my city! James Weldon Johnson
The great place of the western continent, the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond, of the New World. Walt Whitman
Of course I'll return to New York. It's my home. Is there any place else? I'd rather be a lamppost on Seventh Avenue than a queen in another country. Grace Watson
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. E.B. White
New York cannot help but stand as a special order: the place which is not wilderness, the place of light and warmth and the envelopment of the human swarm, the place in which everyone is awake and laughing at three in the morning. Vincent McHugh
Someone from out of town I met last night asked me why I live in New York. I told him I live here because of the tempo and the fast track, because there are always so many more choices. I live her because it ruins you for any other place. Jean Bach
I don't have no intentions of leaving the city. Not yet, anyways. I went back to the reservation a couple of times and I could only stay a week. There's nothing to do out there. This is where the action is. For the time being, I like Manhattan. Wilford "Chief" Parriette
New York took me over. New York has become my natural habitat. I'd be fenced in anywhere else. I can behave exactly as I want: I can appear, I can disappear. Lola Szladits
The thing I've found is the people that are most enthusiastic about living in New York are often people like me who are originally from somewhere else. Kenneth Jackson
When I came to New York people immediately accepted me in the sense that I was anonymous. And I liked that. Patti Smith
Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away. From the moment I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue and smell the leak out of the men's room, then the pickles from the stand just below the subway steps, an instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness. John Burnham Schwartz
New York is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization. H.L. Mencken
The whole world revolves around New York. Very little happens anywhere unless someone in New York presses the button. Duke Ellington
I'd rather be a lamppost in New York than the mayor of Chicago. Jimmy Walker
Something's always happening here. If you're bored in New York it's your own fault. Myrna Loy
Manhattan is a machine, fueled by the millions of people who pour through its streets and subways each day, many of them locked in an exhausting but addictive lifestyle which makes anywhere else seem dull and slow. Fiona Duncan and Leonie Glass
Everyone in New York knows that he is an important person living among other important persons. Brendan Behan
There are only about 400 people in fashionable New York Society. If you go outside the number, you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom, or make other people not at ease. See the point? Ward McCallister
The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up. Jay Leno
Other cities consume culture, New York creates it. Paul Goldberger
New York is where the future comes to audition. Ed Koch
The great days in New York were just before you got there. Lewis Gannett
She dreamed, lulled by the train, of getting off at heaven or New York City, whichever she got to first. Mary Lee Settle
To step from a train platform into Grand Central's extraordinary concourse... is to feel in every fiber that you have arrived someplace important, to know that you have come into a great city and that great city has greeted you properly. Paul Goldberger
New York is one of the finest cities I ever saw... Situated on an island, which I think it will one day cover, it rises, like Venice from the sea, and received into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth. Frances Trollope