“Can any thing in this world be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth can come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!”
Jeremy Taylor, "Apples of Sodom," Part II, Sermon XX of Twenty-Five Sermons for the Winter Half-Year, Preached at Golden Grove (1653)
Misattributed
Variant: What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!
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Anatole France 122
French writer 1844–1924Related quotes
Tablet to ‘Him Who Will Be Made Manifest’
Part Three, Ch. 11
Source: On the Road (1957)
Context: In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Café on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchements on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.
Second Tablet to ‘Him Who Will Be Made Manifest’
“Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.”
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV, 4
“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”
On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic (December 1965)
As quoted in Lindbergh: Flight's Enigmatic Hero (2002) by Von Hardesty
“The more blessed she felt on earth, the more rarely she turned to heaven.”
White Teeth (2000)
The Mike Wallace Interview (ABC) http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/sanger_margaret_t.html,
Posed question: "Do you believe in sin — When I say "believe" I don't mean believe in committing sin, do you believe there is such a thing as a sin