E. B. White Quotes

You always admire what you really don't understand.

I simply liked looking at the world around us.

The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.

Ignorance is the mother of admiration.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

Wonder is the salt of the earth.

To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

Nothing may truly be said to be a miracle except in the profound sense that everything is a miracle.

There are an awful lot of scientists today who believe that before very long we shall have unraveled all the secrets of the universe. There will be no puzzles anymore. To me, it'd be really, really tragic because I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery, feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is and it is perfect and why.

And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, “Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.

Do try to remember this: even the world's not so black as it is painted" -Valerie to Stephen (pg. 408)

I hope I never become so used to the world that it no longer seems wonderful.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?

In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends, and admiration fill up the interspace; but the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration.

As you kind of get over the anxiety about [science and evolution], it actually adds to your sense of awe about this amazing universe that we live in, it doesn't subtract from it at all.