The long-time behavior of orbits is one of the most fundamental properties in dynamical systems. Poincaré studied the Poisson stability, to capture a property whether points return arbitrarily near the initial positions after a sufficiently long time. Birkhoff introduced and studied the concept of recurrent points. We show that the recurrence and Poisson stability of flows on surfaces are topological properties of the orbit spaces. In fact, a flow on a compact connected surface is Poisson stable (resp. recurrent) if and only if the Kolmogorov quotient of the orbit space satisfies T 1 (resp. T 1/2 ) separation axiom. Using such characterizations, we characterize Hausdorff separation axiom for orbit spaces and their Kolmogorov quotients of flows on compact connected surfaces.