George William Curtis Quotations

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.

It is not the ship so much as the skillful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten.

A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

Anger is an expensive luxury in which only men of certain income can indulge.

The test of civilization is its estimate of women.

Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper.

Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.

Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer.

It is not observed in history that families improve with time.

Our common liberty is consecrated by a common sorrow.

Reputation is favorable notoriety as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds and noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind.

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.

Virtue does not truly reward her votary if she leaves him sad and half doubtful whether it would not have been better to serve vice.

Prussia is great because her people are intelligent. They know the alphabet. The alphabet is conquering the world.

Our great social and political advantage is opportunity.

It is the most human and kindly of seasons, as fully penetrated and irradiated with the feeling of human brotherhood, which is the essential spirit of Christianity, as the month of June with sunshine and the balmy breath of roses.

Dreams come true if you survive the hard times!

Anger, even when it punishes the faults of delinquents, ought not to precede reason as its mistress, but attend as a handmaid at the back of reason, to come to the front when bidden. For once it begins to take control of the mind, it calls just what it does cruelly.

Criticism is not construction, it is observation.

Stratagem is the right hand of cunning.

Heroes in history seem to us poetic because they are there. But if we should tell the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry.

Progress begins with the minority. It is completed by persuading the majority, by showing the reason and the of the step forward, and that is accomplished by appealing to the intelligence of the majority.

Good taste consists first upon fitness.

In the journey of the year, the autumn is Venice, spring is Naples, certainly, and the majestic maturity of summer is Rome.

Patriotism is the vital condition of national permanence.

A river is the cosiest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it.

The world is not made for the prosperous alone, nor for the strong.

A journal should be neither an echo nor a pander.

True invective requires great imagination.

Books of entertainment first led Adam Clarke to believe in a spiritual world.

The test of civilization is the estimate of woman.

Patriotism, or the peculiar relation of an individual to his country, is like the family instinct. In the child it is a blind devotion; in the man in intelligent love. The patriot perceives the claim made upon his country by the circumstances and time of her growth and power, and how God is to be served by using those opportunities of helping mankind. Therefore his country's honor is dear to him as his own, and he would as soon lie and steal himself as assist or excuse his country in a crime.

I think that to have known one good, old man-one man, who, through the chances and mischances of a long life, has carried his heart in his hand, like a palm-branch, waving all discords into peace-helps our faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other more than many sermons

Through all history, from the beginning, a noble army of martyrs have fought fiercely and fallen bravely for that unseen mistress, their country. So, through all history, to the end, as long as men believe in God that army must still march and fall, recruited only from the flower of mankind, cheered only by their own hope of humanity, strong only in the confidence of their cause.

There is very little moral mixture in the 'Antislavery' feeling of this country. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part is hatred of slaveholders; a great part is jealousy for white labor, very little is consciousness of wrong done and the wish to right it.

The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.

A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor.

Life is a rich strain of music, suggesting a realm too fair to be.

Happiness is speechless.

The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.

While we read history we make history.

The test of civilization is the estimate of woman. Among savages she is a slave. In the dark ages of Christianity she is a toy and a sentimental goddess. With increasing moral light, and greater liberty, and more universal justice, she begins to develop as an equal human being.

I walked beside the evening sea And dreamed a dream that could not be; The waves that plunged along the shore Said only: "Dreamer, dream no more!"

Happiness lies, first of all, in health.