E. B. White Quotes (72 Quotes)


    I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.

    I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

    A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

    The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.

    As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left us in a bad time.


    Sailors ... say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

    I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

    A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

    Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

    From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting.... On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.

    Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

    The essayist ... can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.

    Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

    A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.

    There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

    What is life We are born, we live a little and we die.

    Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

    She would write 8 or 10 words, then draw her gun and shoot them down.

    DEMOCRACY n The recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.

    I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me.

    The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss-a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.

    Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. ... The businessman is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure the executive walks among ink erasers caparisoned like a knight. This we should be tolerant of--every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse. ... A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express his precise meaning.

    Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

    The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

    I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.

    I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears as much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.

    To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

    An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life.

    We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny.... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they dont like a Communist.

    It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

    Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.

    It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.

    Shocking writing is like murder the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

    Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom.

    I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.

    Commuter one who spends his life In riding to and from his wife A man who shaves and takes a train And then rides back to shave again.

    I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

    Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

    I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.


    We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

    Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

    Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.

    From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.

    When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

    Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.

    I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

    The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.

    I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

    It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.


    More E. B. White Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - People - Mind - Sense & Perception - Writing - Time - Health - World - Literature - Age - Democracy - Nature - Weather - Thought & Thinking - Fate & Destiny - Jokes & Humor - Running - Matter - Loyalty - View All E. B. White Quotations

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    Dale Carnegie - William Arthur Ward - Thomas Kuhn - T. H. White - Michael Cunningham - Joseph Addison - Herbert Kaufman - Henry Lawson - Bill Bryson - Antiphanes


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