Top 40 George William Curtis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Dreams come true if you survive the hard times!”

— George William Curtis

2. “Happiness lies, first of all, in health.”

— George William Curtis

3. “The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.”

— George William Curtis

4. “Happiness is speechless.”

— George William Curtis

5. “Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.”

— George William Curtis

6. “Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

8. “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.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

11. “Stratagem is the right hand of cunning.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

13. “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.”

— George William Curtis

14. “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.”

— George William Curtis

15. “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.”

— George William Curtis

Featured in: Romance Quotes

16. “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.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

18. “Imagination is as good as many voyages – and how much cheaper.”

— George William Curtis

19. “While we read history we make history.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

22. “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.”

— George William Curtis

23. “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.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

25. “A journal should be neither an echo nor a pander.”

— George William Curtis

26. “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.”

— George William Curtis

27. “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.”

— George William Curtis

28. “The test of civilization is the estimate of woman.”

— George William Curtis

29. “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.”

— George William Curtis

30. “Criticism is not construction, it is observation.”

— George William Curtis

31. “True invective requires great imagination.”

— George William Curtis

32. “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.”

— George William Curtis

33. “Our great social and political advantage is opportunity.”

— George William Curtis

34. “Our common liberty is consecrated by a common sorrow.”

— George William Curtis

35. “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.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

Featured in: Strong Quotes

37. “Good taste consists first upon fitness.”

— George William Curtis

38. “Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.”

— George William Curtis

39. “Patriotism is the vital condition of national permanence.”

— George William Curtis

40. “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.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis

42. “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.”

— George William Curtis

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

— George William Curtis