George William Curtis Quotes

Happiness lies, first of all, in health.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.

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!"

Dreams come true if you survive the hard times!

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.

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.

The test of civilization is the estimate of woman.

Happiness is speechless.

While we read history we make history.

Stratagem is the right hand of cunning.

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.

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.

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

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

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. In poetic minds and in popular enthusiasm this feeling becomes closely associated with the soil and the symbols of the country. But the secret sanctification of the soil and the symbol is the idea which they represent, and this idea the patriot worships through the name and the symbol, as a lover kisses with rapture the glove of his mistress and wears a lock of her hair upon his heart.

A journal should be neither an echo nor a pander.

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.

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