Explore Quotes by George William Curtis

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.

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

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.

The test of civilization is its estimate of women.

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

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

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.

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.

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

Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.

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.

Dreams come true if you survive the hard times!

I walked beside the evening sea_x000D__x000D_And dreamed a dream that could not be;_x000D__x000D_The waves that plunged along the shore_x000D__x000D_Said only: "Dreamer, dream no more!"

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.

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

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

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