E. B. White: Man

“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

"Intimations" (December 1941)
One Man's Meat (1942)
Context: Before you can be an internationalist you have first to be a naturalist and feel the ground under you making a whole circle. 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. A club, moreover, or a nation, has a most attractive offer to make: it offers the right to be exclusive. There are not many of us who are physically constituted to resist this strange delight, this nourishing privilege. It is at the bottom of all fraternities, societies, orders. It is at the bottom of most trouble. The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody's. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition.

Personality

“A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist — nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.”

E. B. White

Letter to Corona Machemer (11 June 1975)

World , Time

“A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.”

E. B. White

"The Practical Farmer" http://books.google.com/books?id=njRHAAAAYAAJ&q=%22A+good+farmer+is+nothing+more+nor+less+than+a+handy+man+with+a+sense+of+humus%22&pg=PA218#v=onepage ( October 1940 http://books.google.com/books?id=SvAvAAAAMAAJ&q=%22A+good+farmer+is+nothing+more+nor+less+than+a+handy+man+with+a+sense+of%22&pg=PA555#v=onepage)
One Man's Meat (1942)

Sense

“Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.”

E. B. White

Letter to the New York Herald Tribune (29 November 1947)

Health , Reading , Loyalty

“As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the one thing left to us in a bad time.”

E. B. White

Letter to M. Nadeau (30 March 1973)

Hope , Time

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”

E. B. White

"Coon Tree," The New Yorker (14 June 1956), The Points of My Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South (1962); reprinted in Essays of E.B. White (1977)

Feeling , Nature , Time , Future

“Commuter — one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train
And then rides back to shave again.”

E. B. White

"Commuter," The Lady Is Cold (1929)

Life , Training