In a man’s middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
—E. B. White
Topics: Age
The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay.
—E. B. White
Topics: Language
A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.
—E. B. White
Topics: Dogs
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But 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.
—E. B. White
Topics: Life, Planning
Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
—E. B. White
Topics: Television
Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
—E. B. White
Topics: Architecture
A “fraternity” is the antithesis of fraternity. The first… is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.
—E. B. White
Topics: Perspective
An intelligence service is, in fact, a stupidity service.
—E. B. White
Topics: Intelligence
Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams—Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.
—E. B. White
Topics: Advertising
The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable.
—E. B. White
Topics: Politics
Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
—E. B. White
Topics: Genius
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.
—E. B. White
Topics: Nature
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.
—E. B. White
Topics: Parties
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education—sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
—E. B. White
Topics: Language
The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man’s adjustment to it—the speed of his acceptance.
—E. B. White
Topics: War, Acceptance
All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.
—E. B. White
Topics: Weather
I get up every morning determined both to change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.
—E. B. White
Topics: Time Management, Change, Good, Action
Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
—E. B. White
Topics: Farming
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
—E. B. White
Topics: Youth
There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
—E. B. White
Topics: Agreement
To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
—E. B. White
Topics: Gifts
Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.
—E. B. White
Topics: Pregnancy
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
—E. B. White
Topics: Humor
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new attempt, differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays. There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person.
—E. B. White
Topics: Opinion
A right is a responsibility in reverse.
—E. B. White
There is no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.
—E. B. White
Topics: Consequences
Writing is both mask and unveiling.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- John Updike American Author
- David Wagoner American Poet, Novelist
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Paul Auster American Novelist, Poet
- Hervey Allen American Author
- Wendell Berry American Author, Environmentalist
- L. Frank Baum American Writer
- Jack Kerouac American Novelist, Poet
- Edgar Lee Masters American Poet, Novelist
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