Life & Wisdom Quote by E. B. White

A command that sounds like a Zen koan but lands like newsroom discipline: E. B. White’s “Be obscure clearly” is an elbow to the ribs of anyone who thinks good prose is just clarity, full stop. White isn’t celebrating muddle. He’s acknowledging a stubborn fact about writing (and thinking): some subjects are genuinely knotty, emotional, or unresolved, and forcing them into neat sentences can be a kind of lie.

The genius is in the paradox. “Obscure” admits the limits of certainty; “clearly” insists on responsibility anyway. White’s subtext is ethical as much as stylistic: you don’t get to hide behind jargon, fog, or performative complexity just because the idea is complicated. If the thought is hard, make the hardness legible. Let the reader see where the edges are, where the evidence thins, where the feeling outruns the argument. Clarity becomes honesty about what you don’t know, not just polish on what you do.

Context matters here. White, the longtime New Yorker writer and co-author of The Elements of Style, lived in a culture that rewarded crisp authority. His line needles that American appetite for confident simplification. It also anticipates contemporary debates about “explaining” messy systems - politics, identity, climate - without flattening them into slogans. “Be obscure clearly” is permission to be nuanced without being evasive: say the complicated thing, but don’t make confusion your aesthetic.