New York City has been home to & a source of inspiration for so many creatives, thinkers, and dreamers throughout history. As a result, over the years there have been some fantastic quotes about this great metropolis.

One of my life goals was to visit New York and see this beautiful city for myself. I was curious what the hype was about, and determined to tell everyone that it wasn’t as amazing as it is portrayed to be. And I wasn’t disappointed.

The streets, lights, and skyscrapers will truly give you a feeling like no other city in the world. It’s an experience you truly can’t put into words, especially if you are visiting for the first time.

But there are so many famous quotes and sayings from many New York lovers and critics that attempt to describe this great city.

From poignant reflections on NYC’s unique energy & culture to uplifting mantras highlighting its inimitable spirit, these 100 quotes about New York capture the city in all its glory.

So prepare to be inspired as you read thought-provoking words of wisdom from some of the greatest people to have ever called New York their home.

100 Quotes, Sayings & Captions About The Beautiful New York City

1. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough. – Fran Lebowitz
3. New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice. – Bob Dylan
4. The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. – Pete Hamill
5. 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. – By Ellen R. Shapiro
6. When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough. – Fran Lebowitz
7. People think New York is this big city where no one knows each other, but when you live in the Village, it’s the opposite. – Nigel Barker
8. New York has magnificent eating available, both in restaurants and in the materials available to home cooks in the many specialty markets. – Steve Albini
9. I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question. – Dylan Thomas
10. If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. – Peter Shaffer.
11. If Louis was right, and you only get one great love, New York may just be mine. And I can’t have anybody talking shit about my boyfriend. – Carrie Bradshaw
12. You can do what you like, sir, but I’ll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall. – Edward Rutherfurd
13. When it’s 100 degrees in New York, it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When it’s 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it’s still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York and only 72 in Los Angeles. – Neil Simon
14. The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. – John Updike
15. The diversity, the food, the culture, the constant change – New York City is truly one of the most inspiring places on the planet. – XXMK
16. I love New York. It is an amazing city, and the U.S. Open is a lot about the show. There are tens of thousands of spectators; these are some of the best courts in the world, and there is nothing like being here and making memories. – Stan Wawrinka
17. Over the last few years, NYC has staunchly maintained its welcoming spirit and also made exciting cultural strides forward by giving a voice to many who have in the past been voiceless. It’s an electrifying time for those of us who live in the city of Lady Liberty. – Will Gleason
18. 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
19. I don’t like cities. But I like New York. Other places make me feel like a dork. -Madonna
20. The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. – Pete Hamill.
21. A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I’d die for my fans. – Lady Gaga
22. It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. – Agatha Christie
23. I get out of the taxi, and it’s probably the only city that in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York. – Milos Forman
24. I love New York City…you’re never alone but you’re always on your own. – Blair Waldorf
25. New York, without a doubt, is my favorite city in the world. – Linus Roache
26. One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years. – Tom Wolfe
27. Even if it ain’t all it seems, I got a pocketful of dreams. Baby, I’m from New York, a concrete jungle where dreams are made of. There’s nothing you can’t do. Now you’re in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you. Hear it for New York, New York, New York. – Alicia Keys
28. People go to LA to “find themselves”, they come to New York to become someone new. – Lindsey Kelk
29. Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place. – Johnny Carson
30. I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps. – Frank Sinatra.
31. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. By Ayn Rand
32. You haven’t lived until you died in New York City. – Alexander Woollcott
33. I loved New York, but I never quite felt like New York was my home either. – Sutton Foster
34. Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book – and does. – Groucho Marx
35. Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now that may be a bit much for those who don’t come from New York, but clearly, we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advances. – David Dinkins
36. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night. – Dorothy Parker
37. New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian. – Russell Baker
38. A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times it is a beautiful catastrophe. – Le Corbusier
39. This isn’t a fairytale. It’s New York City. – Alex Flinn
40. So I went to New York City to be born again. It was, and remains, easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. – Kurt Vonnegut
41. To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you. – Billy Graham
42. I regret profoundly that I was not an American and was not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it’s happening. – John Lennon
43. New York is a sucked orange. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
44. One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years. – Tom Wolfe
45. New York is really the place to be; to go to New York, you’re going to the center of the world, the lion’s den. – Zubin Mehta
46. 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
47. As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world. – Pearl S. Buck
48. I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it. – Robert De Niro
49. Make your mark in New York, and you are a made man. – Mark Twain
50. New York is a work of art in and of itself. It’s a masterpiece that shouldn’t make sense, yet somehow, it does. – Jacqueline E. Smith
51. My favorite thing about New York is the people because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are. – Bill Murray
52. 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
53. It’s pretty cliched, but Times Square is just incredible. You really feel like you’re in the capital of the world. – Timothy F. Cahill
54. New York is a work of art in and of itself. It’s a masterpiece that shouldn’t make sense, yet somehow, it does. – Jacqueline E Smith
55. When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere. – Jimmy Breslin
56. New York ladies all look immaculate. – Zac Posen
57. 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. – James Baldwin
58. Being a New Yorker grounds you in every way. Before you walk out of the house, you can dress in the nicest clothes and be whoever you think you are, but when you’re on those streets, you’re just in the school of fish. – Awkafina
59. It couldn’t have happened anywhere but in little old New York. – O. Henry
60. New York is not a city – it’s a world. – Iman
61. Give me the streets of Manhattan! – Walt Whitman
62. There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe. – Elbert Hubbard
63. New York is the meeting place of the people, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American. – Djuna Barnes
64. There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. – Simone de Beauvoir
65. New York is a city that plays hard to get. Do you want me? You better work for it. I love the dirt combined with the adventure, the endless exploring (look up! go down that weird block!), the surprising specificity that you can find (button stores! Filipino barbecue!), and, of course, the mind-boggling stream of humans. – Rony Vardi
66. Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. – Nora Ephron
67. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. – Ayn Rand
68. Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough. – John Steinbeck
69. Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life. – Irving Berlin
70. Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don’t want to go home in the dark. – O. Henry
71. I didn’t know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited. – Greta Gerwig
72. My favorite thing about New York is the people because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are. – Bill Murray
73. Most people are in New York because they need evidence – in large quantities – of human expressiveness, and they need it not now and then but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot. – Vivian Gornick
74. I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny. – Rick Riordan
75. I get out of the taxi, and it’s probably the only city that in reality looks better than on the postcards: New York. – Milos Forman
76. Make your mark in New York and you are a made man. – Mark Twain
77. I love New York. – Hillary Clinton
78. One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt. – Georgia O’Keefe
79. And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame are set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. – Ezra Pound
80. Give me the streets of Manhattan! – Walt Whitman
81. New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed… a race for rent. – Frank Lloyd Wright
82. Things always change, and New York teaches you that. – Richard Hell
83. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth; I came from really humble beginnings – the projects of New York City – and I worked my way to get to where I am. – Adrienne Bailon
84. More than anything else New York is a city of superlatives, a place where the best, the brightest, and the biggest are the norm.- Marilyn J. Appleberg
85. It always feels good to come back here. I love New York… it’s just nice to see a lot of familiar faces. – Latrell Sprewell
86. If you’re greedy for life, that’s what New York is all about. If you’re trying to get as much as you can every day, this city is the place to be. – Pam Nelson
87. If you want to surf, move to Hawaii. If you like to shop, move to New York. If you like acting and Hollywood, move to California. But if you like college football, move to Texas. – Ricky Williams
88. New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.- F. Scott Fitzgerald
89. A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. – Le Corbusier
90. You can try to change New York, but it’s like Jay-Z says: Concrete bunghole where dreams are made up. There’s nothing you can do. – Liz Lemon
91. New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. – Joan Didion
92. I moved to New York City for my health. I’m paranoid, and it was the only place where my fears were justified. – Anita Weiss
93. I love New York City; I’ve got a gun. – Charles Barkley
94. I knew I couldn’t live in America and I wasn’t ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America – New York City. – Spalding Gray
95. Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines. – David Letterman
96. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. – Ayn Rand
97. I’ve always lived in a city. I’m very social, and in a place like New York, even if you’re alone on the subway, you never feel lonely. – Ana Gasteyer
98. I’m in a New York state of mind. – Billy Joel

New York is a lively, bustling city with a special energy unlike anywhere else in the world. Each of the quotes about New York captures a unique facet of this magical place, whether it’s admiration for its remarkable skyline, respect for its history and culture, or fascination with its fast-paced way of life.

Every one of these quotes serves as a reminder of why so many people around the globe are drawn to New York – it truly is an unparalleled and extraordinary city.

If you decide to visit this beautiful city here are 31 Fun Things To Do In New York City to make it a memorable experience.