It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.
E. B. WhiteRead
Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the balance between enjoying life and taking action to improve the world.
E. B. White reflects on the internal conflict faced each day: the desire to help the world versus the need to appreciate life's simple pleasures. He suggests that savoring the world is fundamental, implying that true motivation for change comes from a deep appreciation of life itself.
Themes
SavorWorldBalanceLifeAppreciationAction
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about environmental conservation, one could quote this to highlight the importance of both enjoying nature and protecting it.
More from E. B. White
All quotes →It isn't silence you can cut with a knife any more, it's interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage.
E. B. WhiteRead
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
E. B. WhiteRead
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E. B. WhiteRead
A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.
E. B. WhiteRead
All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.
E. B. WhiteRead
Similar quotes
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole
Karl MarxRead
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
Hannah ArendtRead
I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.
David BowieRead
Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.
William Ralph IngeRead
Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities.
Thomas PaineRead
Hinduism insists on the brotherhood of not only all mankind but of all that lives.
Mahatma GandhiRead