Top 300 E.B. White Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments – moments of sustained creation – when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.”

— E.B. White

302. “But I think the Court again heard clearly the simple theme that ennobles our Constitution: that no one shall be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe because of nonconformity.”

— E.B. White

303. “He carried a pencil that put a camera to shame.”

— E.B. White

304. “Almost all spiders are rather nice-looking.”

— E.B. White

305. “When in love, one must take risks.”

— E.B. White

306. “Perhaps success in the future will depend partly on our ability to generate cheap power, but I think it will depend to a greater extent on our ability to resist a technological formula that is sterile: peas without pageantry, corn without coon, knowledge without wisdom, kitchens without a warm stove. There is more to these rocks than uranium; there is the lichen on the rock, the smell of the fern whose feet are upon the rock, the view from the rock. Last.”

— E.B. White

307. “Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.”

— E.B. White

308. “In a sense, the only genuinely secure person is a healthy man possessed of absolutely nothing; such a man stands aloof and safe – there is no way either to reduce his fortune or to debase his currency.”

— E.B. White

309. “I wanted no interruption in the regularity of feeding, the steadiness of growth, the even succession of days. I wanted no interruption, wanted no oil, no deviation.”

— E.B. White

310. “The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive.”

— E.B. White

311. “When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said – it makes all the difference. So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.”

— E.B. White

312. “It’s been fifteen years since we last wintered in this house. Settling in again to live steadily right around the year, as we used to do, has been full of excitement and the sense of our changed condition.”

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

314. “I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude, knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards of human behavior.”

— E.B. White

315. “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.”

— E.B. White

316. “As for business, we agree that it is a hard, cold-blooded game. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. The fact that about eighty-five per cent of the dogs have recently been eaten by the other dogs perhaps explains what long ago we noticed about business: that it had a strong smell of boloney. If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach.”

— E.B. White

317. “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.”

— E.B. White

318. “I fell in love with the sound of an early typewriter and I have been stuck with it ever since.”

— E.B. White

319. “There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.”

— E.B. White

320. “It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard.”

— E.B. White

321. “As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.”

— E.B. White

322. “Louis is a musician. Like most musicians, he is in need of money.”

— E.B. White

323. “Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. They are loaded with opinion, moral thoughts, quick evaluations, youthful hopes and cares and sorrows. Occasionally they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy. That is why I have refrained from burning them.”

— E.B. White

324. “It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog’s nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.”

— E.B. White

325. “Very fine law,” said Stuart. “When I am Chairman, anybody who is mean to anybody else is going to catch it.”

— E.B. White

326. “Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life’s dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.”

— E.B. White

327. “I was sorry for her, as I am for any who are evicted from their haunts by the younger and stronger – always a sad occasion for man or beast.”

— E.B. White

328. “In almost everyone’s life there is one event that changes the whole course of his existence.”

— E.B. White

329. “One morning when the wind was blowing from the West, Stuart put on his sailor suit and his sailor hat, took his spyglass down from the shelf, and set out for a walk, full of the joy of life and the fear of dogs.”

— E.B. White

330. “In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation–a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless.”

— E.B. White

331. “Every day was a happy day, and every night was peaceful.”

— E.B. White

332. “One nation’s common sense is another nation’s high blood pressure.”

— E.B. White

333. “When I am composed I feel no need of affiliating myself with anybody. There is a lot of the cat in me, and cats are not joiners.”

— E.B. White

334. “Some day people will put faith in poets, who saw things centuries ago in perfect clarity.”

— E.B. White

335. “So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back.”

— E.B. White

336. “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”

— E.B. White

337. “Some of the best writings of writers, it seems to us, were done before they actually thought of themselves as engaged in producing literature. Some of the best humor of humorists was produced before ever they heard the distant laughter of their multitudes.”

— E.B. White

338. “A distinguishing political feature of America is that it has never had a voice; it has had a lot of hoopdedoo but no voice, and that’s the way we like it.”

— E.B. White

339. “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