Top 300 E.B. White Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “This is what youth must figure out: Girls, love, and living. The having, the not having, The spending and giving, And the meloncholy time of not knowing. This is what age must learn about: The ABC of dying. The going, yet not going, The loving and leaving, And the unbearable knowing and knowing.”

— E.B. White

202. “A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.”

— E.B. White

203. “The doctor said the wound was superficial. The old cob didn’t know what “superficial” meant, but it sounded serious.”

— E.B. White

204. “When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.”

— E.B. White

205. “It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

— E.B. White

206. “The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.”

— E.B. White

207. “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.”

— E.B. White

208. “We stand or fall by television.”

— E.B. White

209. “The sky,” he wrote on his slate, “is my living room. The woods are my parlor. The lonely lake is my bath. I can’t remain behind a fence all my life.”

— E.B. White

210. “I have moments of hoping and dreaming that we will live to see another Golden Age, or at least Silver Age, when writers will be both gay and disciplined and when even newspapers will show an interest in the litry life.”

— E.B. White

211. “I have no warm up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.”

— E.B. White

212. “The concern of a democracy is that no honest man shall feel uncomfortable, I don’t care who he is, or how nutty he is.”

— E.B. White

213. “He wiped his face with his handkerchief, for he was quite warm from the exertion of being Chairman of the World. It had taken more running and leaping and sliding than he had imagined.”

— E.B. White

214. “Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.”

— E.B. White

215. “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.”

— E.B. White

216. “The light strengthened, the mornings came sooner.”

— E.B. White

217. “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.”

— E.B. White

218. “A right is a responsibility in reverse.”

— E.B. White

219. “In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.”

— E.B. White

220. “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

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

— E.B. White

222. “Early next morning the craft hit the beach again and resumed loading pulpwood. It was an awesome sight, this tentacle of empire reaching out into so remote and quiet a spot; and it was a fearsome sound, the throbbing engines of an old, dead war furnishing the paper for new conquests in the magazine field.”

— E.B. White

223. “The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.”

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

225. “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.”

— E.B. White

226. “Home was quite a place when people stayed there.”

— E.B. White

227. “This theme interests me because I believe, with the author, that security declines as security machinery expands.”

— E.B. White

228. “I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home – a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn’t forget that sort of association.”

— E.B. White

229. “If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine’s copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.”

— E.B. White

230. “If they’d hang head-down at the top of the thing and wait quietly, maybe something good would come along. But no – with men it’s rush, rush, rush, every minute.”

— E.B. White

231. “A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user’s dreams than to express a precise meaning.”

— E.B. White

232. “The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.”

— E.B. White

233. “Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.”

— E.B. White

234. “I find the natural world as engaging and as innocent as it ever was. When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed, and I have no complaints.”

— E.B. White

235. “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.”

— E.B. White

236. “I hope that Belief never is made to appear mandatory.”

— E.B. White

237. “Humor is like a frog. You can dissect it to see how it works, but by then, it’s dead.”

— E.B. White

238. “There is a decivilizing bug somewhere at work; unconsciously persons of stern worth, by not resenting and resisting the small indignities of the times, are preparing themselves for the eventual acceptance of what they themselves know they don’t want.”

— E.B. White

239. “Old stone walls ran into the woods, and now and then there would be an empty barn as a ghostly landmark. The night grew frosty and the ground underfoot was slippery with rime. The bare birches wore the stars on their fingers, and the world rolled seductively, a dark symphony of brooding groves and plains.”

— E.B. White

240. “The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn’t as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war’s consequences.”

— E.B. White

241. “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

242. “Wilbur never forgot Charlotte... She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes a long who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

— E.B. White

243. “Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.”

— E.B. White

244. “It isn’t silence you can cut with a knife any more, it’s interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage.”

— E.B. White

245. “It is best to have a strong curiosity, weak affiliations.”

— E.B. White

246. “The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.”

— E.B. White

247. “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

248. “The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.”

— E.B. White

249. “It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition. A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow.”

— E.B. White

250. “Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.”

— E.B. White