120+ Best San Francisco Quotes and San Francisco Instagram Captions

Recently visited San Francisco or planning to visit San Francisco soon? Maybe you are looking for some inspiration and the best San Francisco quotes?

Or maybe you have a lot of photos & videos for social media and need unique San Francisco Instagram captions? I got you covered.

San Francisco, the City by the Bay, is a destination that steals the hearts of travelers from around the world. Renowned for its iconic landmarks, diverse neighborhoods, and progressive culture, this vibrant city offers a unique experience unlike any other. 

That is why I have prepared more than 100 best San Francisco quotes for the most inspirational captions.

In this article, you will find different varieties of San Francisco quotes. Iconic sayings, unique San Francisco Instagram captions, or something easy-going and fun.

Whether you are traveling to San Francisco or live in San Francisco already, you will find some of the best San Francisco quotes in this post, so keep on reading!

Best San Francisco Quotes

“There may not be a Heaven, but there is a San Francisco.” – Ashleigh Brilliant

“San Francisco itself is art… every block is a short story, every hill a novel, every home a poem.” – William Saroyan

“San Franciscans are very proud of their city, and they should be.  It’s the most beautiful place in the world.” – Robert Redford

“San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home.” – Benjamin F. Taylor

“San Francisco is a city with the assets of a metropolis without the disadvantages of size and industry.” – Jack Kenny.

“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

“If you have to be a one-hit wonder, then San Francisco is the one to have.” – Scott McKenzie

“San Francisco is poetry. Even the hills rhyme.” – Pat Montandon

“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

“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.” – Mike O’Halloran

Unique San Francisco Instagram captions 

Stay golden, San Francisco.

I fell in love. His name is San Fran.

Happiness is holding tickets that say San Francisco.

Everyone needs a little San Francisco in their life.

Somewhere between living and dreaming, there’s San Francisco.

There’s no time to be bored in a city as beautiful as San Francisco.

West Coast, Best Coast.

Falling in love with San Francisco one cable car at a time.

Dear San Francisco, I will never get over you.

Golden Gate Bridge. Golden beach. Golden life.

Funny San Francisco puns for Instagram captions

Oh how I’ve mist you, Golden Gate Bridge.

Good bay, San Francisco!

I’m going to gate leaving San Francisco.

The streets here are San Frenetic.

In that San Fran state of mind.

It’s hard to fog-get your first time in San Francisco.

I’m a San Fan-cisco.

I love the San Francisco Bae.

I’ve red that the Golden Gate Bridge is nearly two miles long!

Funny quotes about San Francisco

“San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.” – John Steinbeck

“Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.” – John Lennon

“It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.” – Oscar Wilde

“The number of foggy days over the city is never reported, reportedly. But take it from me— there’s enough to satisfy everyone, and dissatisfy somebody.” – Herb Caen

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” – Mark Twain

“What I like best about San Francisco is San Francisco.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

“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

“Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much gone to me. You go there as a snarky New Yorker thinking it’s politically correct, it’s crunchy granola, it’s vegetarian, and it surprises you every time. It’s a two-fisted drinking town, a carnivorous meat-eating town, it’s dirty and nasty and wonderful.” – Anthony Bourdain

“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

“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

Top San Francisco quotes

“The San Francisco skyline sparkles in the distance, the bay spread out before it like a shark-infested welcome mat.” – T.T. Monday

“San Francisco values did not come into the world with flowers in their hair; they were born howling, in work and strife.” – David Talbot

“San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.” – Rudyard Kipling

“Maybe I’ll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.” – Philip K. Dick

“I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me.” – John Steinbeck

“I’ve never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.” – Heather Demetrios

“Bright yellow lemons twinkled in the twilight sun on a terrace tree, and far beyond my window, San Francisco lay, flat like a pastel toy.” – Aspen Matis

“He hasn’t been in San Francisco for a number of years. He’s looking forward to being in the city again. It’s a town that knows how to have a good time, but without all the mess and craze of New York. San Francisco always does things with a touch of of class.” – William J. Mann

“Sometimes it was hard to breathe, knowing how small my world could be. Maybe in San Francisco, it wouldn’t feel like the universe was conspiring to keep me in a bubble.” – Heather Demetrios

“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

Short San Francisco quotes 

“I left my heart in San Francisco.” – Tony Bennet

“I prefer a wet San Francisco to a dry Manhattan.” – Larry Geraldi

“Every man should be allowed to love two cities, his own and San Francisco.” – Gene Fowler

“San Francisco, city of dreaming spires.” – Eddie Izzard

“East is East, and West is San Francisco.” – O. Henry

“Two days in this city is worth two months in New York.” – Robert Menzies

“Up in the San Francisco, where the forest meets the bridge.” – Foxygen

“San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.” – John Steinbeck

“San Francisco, city of dreaming spires.” – Eddie Izzard

“Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.” – Susanna Kaysen

Inspirational quotes about San Francisco

“If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.” – William Saroyan

“San Francisco is a complex town that lets you be yourself, that accepts you even if your family doesn’t. No matter how uncomfortable your own skin feels, you can move to this city, discover who you really are, and plant your feet on the ground.” – Jack Boulware

“I moved to San Francisco because the masquerade of kindly gestures is, at least, kind. And it remains kind. And all the people who would sit back and comment on the garishness of the costumes, the hollowness of the dialogue, the lack of divine conviction, well, all those people are either gone or fifteen years old.” – Jay Caspian King

“But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything – you wouldn’t think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.” – Dylan Thomas

“I don’t think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn’t love the place, Americans or others.” – Doris Lessing

“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home is a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.” – William Saroyan

“I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life.” – Imogen Cunningham

“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

“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

“Money lives in New York. Power sits in Washington. Freedom sips cappuccino in a sidewalk café in San Francisco.” – Joe Flower

Quotes about life in San Francisco

“San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.” – Paul Kantner

“There is no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement, and colored construction paper. Its the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons.” – Dave Eggers

“Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?” – Herb Caen

“San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold—rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flatland places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city that can never have existed.” – John Steinbeck

“You can go one block to the next in San Francisco and get a completely different opinion of what the issue is.” – Don Johnson

“Cities are like gentlemen, they are born, not made.  You are either a city or you are not, size has nothing to do with it.  I bet San Francisco was a city from the very first time it had a dozen settlers.” – Will Rogers

“Like its namesake, San Francisco opens its arms to all sentient beings. The emotionally and spiritually wounded, in particular, have always come here looking for freedom and change, for a place to grow and be themselves.” – Jim Crotty

“The writer loves the fog as it pours in; he loves the sun when the fog pours out. The rest of California is Beach Boys country, but San Francisco has that moody thing going on, those blues notes wrapped in moisture, an atmosphere that tempers California dreaming and makes life more real.” – Eric Maisel

“I can walk down the streets of San Francisco, and here I’m normal.” – Robin Williams

“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

San Francisco travel quotes

“I never dreamed I’d like any city as well as London. San Francisco is exciting, moody, exhilarating. I even love the muted fogs.” – Julie Christie

“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

“San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities” – Cecil Beaton

“I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved.” – Mark Twain

“San Francisco has only one drawback – ’tis hard to leave.” – Rudyard Kipling

“I’m just mad for San Francisco. It’s like London and Paris stacked on top of each other.” – Twiggy

“Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible.” – Walter Cronkite

“San Francisco is where you come when you want to see people looking like who they truly are.” – Mark Childress

” I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts.” – John Steinbeck

“San Francisco always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world.” – Duke Ellington

Quotes about people in San Francisco

“San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly mad people.” – Rudyard Kipling

“I love this city. If I am elected, I’ll move the White House to San Francisco. Everybody’s so friendly.” – Robert Kennedy

“If free speech and individuality are American characteristics, there is no place more American than San Francisco.” – Desi del Valle

“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

“San Francisco beats the world for novelties, but the inventive faculties of her people are exercised on a specialty. Controversy is our forte.” – Unknown

“What brings you up to the City?’ he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there’s only one city.” – Ross Macdonald

“As many of you know, I came from San Francisco. 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

“San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of remarkable beauty.” – Rudyard Kipling

“It’s the grandest city I saw in America.  If everyone acted as the San Franciscans did, there would be hope for settlement of the world’s difficulties.” – Frol Zozlov

“If you’re going to San Francisco, you’re gonna meet some gentle people there.” – John Phillips

More San Francisco Quotes

“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

“That, my dear detective, was the other San Francisco. You’ve probably seen it before, just out of the corner of your eye. You’ve probably dismissed it all your life.” – Laura Oliva

“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

“I think the beauty of San Francisco is that you can skip without really freaking anybody out.” – Chris Reifsteck

“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

“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

“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out 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

“There is more grace per square foot in San Francisco than any place on earth.” – Fulton J. Sheen

“Anyone is fortunate to live here. If I were your president, I would levy a tax on you for living in San Francisco.” – Mikhail Gorbachev

“I love San Francisco. It’s by the sea, there’s a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.” – Brian Eno

“But I would rather be with you, somewhere in San Francisco on a back porch in July, just looking up to Heaven, at this crescent in the sky.” – Robert Hunter

In conclusion…

This is the end of the best San Francisco quotes and some of the coolest San Francisco Instagram captions. I am sure you enjoyed reading this article, but which quotes did you like the most? Maybe you want to save them all and teleport to San Francisco already? I feel you!

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