Elwyn Brooks White Quotes

266 quotes in 3286 categories

• A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog,…
• 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…
• Deathlessness should be arrived at in a... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of…
• 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…
• 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…
• I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
• Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally…
• From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most…
• 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…
• 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…
• People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
• The theme of 'Charlotte's Web' is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a…
• Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
• I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of…
• It's hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world and when to respond to its challenge. If the world were merely…
• Being the owner of Dachshunds, to me a book on dog discipline becomes a volume of inspired humor. Every sentence is a riot. Some day,…
• Walden is the only book I own, although there are some others unclaimed on my shelves. Every man, I think, reads one book in his…
• A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn…
• A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.
• 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…

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