Life & Wisdom Quote by E. B. White

Mention "luck" around the self-made man and you puncture his favorite genre: the heroic origin story. E. B. White’s line is a quiet dart aimed at American mythology, where success is treated less as a tangle of circumstances than as a moral certificate. The sentence works because it’s posed like a social rule, the kind you learn by watching people bristle at the wrong word. "In the presence of" makes luck sound indecorous, almost impolite, as if it were an embarrassing relative brought up at dinner. White doesn’t argue; he observes the taboo and lets the defensiveness do the talking.

The subtext is not that effort is meaningless, but that the self-made identity depends on controlling the narrative of causality. Admit luck and you introduce contingency: the mentor who returned a call, the rent that was briefly affordable, the body that didn’t break down at 28, the timing of a boom, the accident you survived. "Self-made" is a rhetorical fortress built to keep those variables outside the story, because once you let them in, you also let in obligation. If luck helped, then society, policy, and other people matter; the winner’s success becomes less a verdict on merit and more a snapshot of an uneven playing field.

White, a wry moralist with a journalist’s ear, is capturing a mid-century American confidence that often slid into sanctimony. His irony lands because it reveals how fragile that confidence is: it can’t tolerate a single honest noun.