Best San Francisco Quotes and Sayings
We’ve lined up some of our favorite San Francisco quotes and sayings from one of our favorite cities.
C’mon, how many cities have named their omnipresent fog? His name is “Karl the Fog.” Check out Karl’s Twitter following, with over 200,000 followers. How great is that?
San Francisco’s influence is seen in literature, movies, and culture. It’s a city that’s made an impact on Americans across the country and visitors from outside the country.
Here are some famous San Francisco quotes and sayings about this beautiful city.
Good San Francisco Quotes
1.) San Francisco has only one drawback – it is hard to leave.
Rudyard Kipling
2.) San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.
Paul Kanter
3.) There may not be a Heaven, but there is San Francisco.
Ashleigh Brilliant
4.) If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.
William Saroyan
5.) San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.
Cecil Beaton
Funny San Francisco Quotes
6.) One day, if I go to heaven… I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’
Herb Caen
7.) You know what it is? (It) is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.
John Steinbeck
8.) You are fortunate to live here. If I were your President, I would levy a tax on you for living in San Francisco!
Mikhail Gorbachev
9.) It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.
Oscar Wilde
10.) San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home.
Benjamin F. Taylor
11.) Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.
Anthony Bourdain
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City by the Bay Sayings
12.) San Francisco is really fun and liberal, and it’s my kind of politics. It’s like being Jewish in front of Jewish people.
Elayne Boosler
13.) I always see about six scuffles a night when I come to San Francisco. That’s one of the town’s charms.
Errol Flynn
14.) Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.
John Lennon
15.) San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of remarkable beauty.
Rudyard Kipling
16.) You wouldn’t think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes.
Dylan Thomas
Mark Twain San Francisco Quotes
17.) The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco
Mark Twain
18.) I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved.
Mark Twain
San Francisco Sayings
19.) Money lives in New York. Power sits in Washington. Freedom sips cappuccino in a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco.
Joe Flower
20.) It’s simply a very romantic place. Just one look at any of those streets, and you couldn’t be anywhere else — it’s so beautiful, and there’s that location and the sense of the free spirit. Who couldn’t become ravenous in such a place?
Julia Child
21.) San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful.
Frank Lloyd Wright
22.) East is East, and West is San Francisco.
O. Henry
23.) I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic [of the 1960s] didn’t mushroom and envelop the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive.
Grace Slick
24.) San Franciscans are very proud of their city, and they should be. It’s the most beautiful place in the world.
Robert Redford
SF Quotes
25.) Suddenly, we reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
Jack Kerouac
26.) I don’t think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn’t love the place, Americans, or others.
Doris Lessing
27.) The morning, like all San Francisco mornings, promised spring. In California, the seasons come daily: spring, the dewy mornings covered lightly in gray mist; summer, when the sun burns through and rises directly overhead at midday; afternoon autumns, crisp breezy, when colors show off and the air smells clean into twilight; winter is the night.
Elizabeth Stark
Frisco Phrases
28.) I can walk down the streets of San Francisco, and here I’m normal.
Robin Williams
29.) To a traveler paying his first visit, it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.
Fitz Hugh Ludlow
30.) When you get tired of walking around in San Francisco, you can always lean against it.
Unknown
31.) San Francisco itself is art, above all, literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, and every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
William Saroyan
32.) The Bay Area is so beautiful; I hesitate to preach about heaven while I’m here.
Billy Graham
33.) It is a good thing the early settlers landed on the east coast… if they’d landed in San Francisco, the rest of the country would still be uninhabited.
Herbert Mye
Heartfelt San Francisco Quotes
34.) A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gape at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 a.m. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky, and foghorns speak dark grays — San Francisco is such a city.
Herb Caen
35.) San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus of the world — one of the really urbane communities in the United States — one of the truly cosmopolitan places, and for many, many years, it always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world.
Duke Ellington
SF Sayings
36.) The extreme geniality of San Francisco’s economic, intellectual, and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States.
James Michener
37.) I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited.
Hinton Helper
38.) San Francisco beats the world for novelties, but the inventive faculties of her people are exercised on a specialty. Controversy is our forte.
San Francisco Call
39.) Every man should be allowed to love two cities, his own and San Francisco.
Gene Fowler
40.) I prefer a wet San Francisco to a dry Manhattan.
Larry Geraldi
41.) Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady.
Norman Mailer
San Francisco – Top Tourist Attractions Video
I left my Heart
42.) It may be Baghdad by the Bay to you, but to me, it’s Resurrection City.
Robert Kennedy
43.) The cool, grey city of love.
George Sterling
44.) I’m just mad for San Francisco. It is like London and Paris stacked on top of each other.
Twiggy
45.) What I like best about San Francisco is San Francisco.
Frank Lloyd
46.) This is the friendliest city in the world.
Joe di Maggio
47.) We don’t have a lot of farms there. Well, we do have one — it’s a mushroom farm, so you know what that means.
Nancy Pelosi
48.) There are a thousand viewpoints in the viewtiful city.
Herb Caen
49.) The port of San Francisco is a marvel of nature and might well be called the harbor of harbor.
Juan Bautista de Anza
50.) San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world…I would probably rank it at the top or near the top. It’s small but photogenic and has layers…You never have problems finding great angles that people have never done.
Ang Lee
Inspirational San Francisco Quotes
51.) Perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the blood, the impulse of men who packed Virgil with their bean bags on the overland journey conspired to make San Francisco a city of artists.
William Henry Irwin
52.) Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible.
Walter Cronkite
53.) Every morning in San Francisco was a bit like waking up on the edge of the earth: beautiful and damp and wild, full of the strange music people make, open-armed, into the wind.
Elizabeth Percer, author of Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco, is pretty much dead to me.
54.) If free speech and individuality are American characteristics, there is no place more American than San Francisco.
Desi del Valle
55.) I love this city. If I am elected, I’ll move the White House to San Francisco. Everybody’s so friendly.
Robert Kennedy
56.) It’s simply a very romantic place. Just one look at any of those streets, and you couldn’t be anywhere else.
Julia Child
Golden Gate Quotes
57.) The Golden Gate wasn’t our fault either, but we still put a bridge across it.
Larry Wall
58.) The Golden Gate Bridge’s daily strip tease from enveloping stoles of mist to full frontal glory is still the most provocative show in town.
Mary Moore Mason
59.) Such was life in the Golden Gate: / Gold dusted all we drank and ate, / And I was one of the children told, / ‘We all must eat our peck of gold.’
Robert Frost
60.) San Francisco! City of dreaming spires, people live here… Golden Gate Bridge, ahh, the Romans came here.
Eddie Izzard
61.) The Golden Gate Bridge should have a long bungee cord for people who aren’t quite ready to commit suicide but want to get in a little practice.
George Carlin
62.) Animation had been used only for things like King Kong and the destruction of cities, which was very popular in the 1950s. I got tired of destroying cities – I destroyed New York, I destroyed San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Rome, and Washington. I was looking for a new outlet, and I came across the Sinbad Legends.
Ray Harryhausen
Out West
63.) Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.
Peter James
64.) You can find your way across this country using burger joint the way a navigator uses stars…We have munched Bridge burgers in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and Cable burgers hard by the Golden Gate, Dixie burgers in the sunny South, and Yankee Doodle burgers in the North. We had a Capitol Burger – guess where. And so help us, in the inner courtyard of the Pentagon, a Penta burger.
Charles Kuralt
65.) Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
66.) This studio has more suspensions than the Golden Gate Bridge.
Humphrey Bogart on Warner Bros.
San Francisco Instagram Captions
Here are some of the best San Francisco captions we could find.
67.) West Coast, Best Coast.
68.) Golden State of Mind.
69.) Stay golden, San Francisco.
70.) Falling in love, one cable car at a time.
71.) Chillin’ in the San Francisco hills.
72.) Golden Beach. Golden Life.
73.) Happy as a clam at Fisherman’s Wharf.
74.) Sea-sing every moment in San Fran.
San Francisco Slogans
75.) San Francisco: The Golden Gate City.
76.) Sanny Franny.
77.) Baghdad by the Bay.
78.) The City By the Bay.
79.) San Fran – frowned upon by many locals.
80.) Fog City.
81.) San Francisco: Everybody’s Favorite City.
82.) San Francisco: The City That Knows How.
83.) Frisco.
84.) San Francisco: Golden City.
85.) San Fran State of Mind.
Notable San Francisco Quotations
86.) San Francisco is poetry. Even the hills rhyme.
Pat Montandon
87.) A bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.
Rebecca Solnit
88.) San Francisco, coolest place ever.
Imogen Poots
89.) I grew up in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and in the 1950s and ’60s, it was a natural paradise.
Huey Lewis
90.) I would rather be in San Francisco than just about anywhere on Earth.
Joe Buck
91.) I’ve always had a connection here in the city from the first day I arrived. I stayed in the city. I made San Francisco my home. (And) I was seen in the offseason at a lot of different functions, and people liked that.
Willie McCovey
92.) I have this insane and unabated longing for San Francisco. I come up there every chance that I get.
Aisha Tyler
93.) I was married once in San Francisco. I haven’t seen her for many years. The great earthquake and fire in 1906 destroyed the marriage certificate. There’s no legal proof. Which means that earthquakes aren’t always bad.
W.C. Fields
94.) You are fortunate to live here. If I were your President, I would levy a tax on you for living in San Francisco!
Mikhail Gorbachev
95.) San Francisco is exciting, moody, and exhilarating. I even love the muted fogs.
Julie Christie
Short San Francisco Quotes
96.) I am a San-Fan-Cisco.
Unknown
97.) This is one Hart that you will not leave in San Francisco.
Gary Hart
98.) I prefer a wet San Francisco to a dry Manhattan.
Larry Geraldi
99.) America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.
Tennessee Williams.
100.) There is more grace per square foot in San Francisco than any place on Earth.
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
101.) Now there’s a grown-up swinging town.
Frank Sinatra
102.) San Francisco is the friendliest city in the world.
Joe DiMaggio
103.) I left my heart in San Francisco.
Tony Bennet
104.) Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
105.) Every man should be allowed to love two cities, his own and San Francisco.
Gene Fowler
106.) This city is a point upon a map of fog.
Ambrose Bierce
107.) San Francisco, city of dreaming spires.
Eddie Izzard
Background on the City by the Bay
San Francisco has always been special, whether it’s the weather, the people, its natural beauty, the industries, or anything else about it. It is the city of creativity.
The culture of this city is like no other. Many important men and women have made the Golden City their home because they fell in love with it. And many cherish it as the best city in the world and dream of living here someday. Few do not fall for the City the first time they visit it.
By Mike O’Halloran
Mike is the founder and editor of Greeting Card Poet.
Extra Extra
If you know any other San Francisco quotes, sayings, or slogans you’d like to see included, please send them our way via the Contact page. Thanks!
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