Top 300 E.B. White Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.”

— E.B. White

52. “Write about it by day and dream about it by night.”

— E.B. White

53. “Loneliness is a strange gift.”

— E.B. White

54. “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.”

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

56. “You have been my friends. That in itself is a tremendous thing.”

— E.B. White

57. “Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.”

— E.B. White

58. “You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.”

— E.B. White

59. “Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.”

— E.B. White

60. “Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.”

— E.B. White

61. “Use the smallest word that does the job.”

— E.B. White

62. “One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.”

— E.B. White

63. “I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, which is not a bad procedure because the easiest way to have consequential thoughts is to start putting them down.”

— E.B. White

64. “In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.”

— E.B. White

65. “I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.”

— E.B. White

66. “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.”

— E.B. White

67. “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.”

— E.B. White

68. “Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.”

— E.B. White

69. “His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.”

— E.B. White

70. “To achieve style, begin by affecting none.”

— E.B. White

71. “A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.”

— E.B. White

72. “I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet 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.”

— E.B. White

73. “THE BARN was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell – as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world.”

— E.B. White

74. “By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

— E.B. White

75. “Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please.”

— E.B. White

76. “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.”

— E.B. White

77. “I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.”

— E.B. White

78. “I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.”

— E.B. White

79. “I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty – everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?”

— E.B. White

80. “Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time.”

— E.B. White

81. “The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”

— E.B. White

82. “I take Democrats to bed with me for lack of a dachshund, although as a matter of fact on occasions like this I am almost certain to be visited by the ghost of Fred, my dash-hound everlasting, dead these many years. In life, Fred always attended the sick, climbing right into bed with the patient like some lecherous old physician, and making a bad situation worse.”

— E.B. White

83. “The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.”

— E.B. White

84. “Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

— E.B. White

85. “There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.”

— E.B. White

86. “All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.”

— E.B. White

87. “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

88. “Writing is hard work and bad for the health.”

— E.B. White

89. “The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.”

— E.B. White

90. “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.”

— E.B. White

91. “Sailors have an expression about the weather: they 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.”

— E.B. White

92. “I shall get up on Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness... Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”

— E.B. White

93. “Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.”

— E.B. White

94. “New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!”

— E.B. White

95. “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.”

— E.B. White

96. “To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. “The Distant Music of the Hounds,” 1954.”

— E.B. White

97. “The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.”

— E.B. White

98. “Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.”

— E.B. White

99. “Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it.”

— E.B. White

100. “I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend – to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit.”

— E.B. White