E. B. White Quotes

The man [President Woodrow Wilson] has no sense of things that penetrates below the surface. With him the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.

Trump has words, but there's not really any depth there.

Saying the words that come from knowledge is no sign of having it.

The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

Let those find fault whose wit's so very small, They've need to show that they can think at all; Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below. Fops may have leave to level all they can; As pigmies would be glad to lop a man. Half-wits are fleas; so little and so light, We scarce could know they live, but that they bite.

Deep is the well of truth and long does it take to know what has fallen into its depths.

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial.

When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, 'I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,' Epictetus replied, 'I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!’.

PLAIN SUPERFICIALITY is the character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with regard to those two points.

While you're playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.

The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.

Said the monk: "All these mountains and rivers and the earth and stars - where do they come from?" Said the master: "Where does your question come from?"

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.

Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?

I would hope that nothing that I write would ever seem earnest because I subscribe absolutely to Franz Nietzsche's claim when he says, "Ah, earnestness, the sure sign of a slow mind." Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.

I know that's the sort of thing people say and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, 'You don't mean that, you just think it sounds good.

There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.

The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.

I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.

The idea of inclusion has become kind of a stone that we've passed our hand over so many times that it doesn't mean anything.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.