Quotes about oyster (59 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

As quoted in The 48 Laws of Power (2000) by Robert Greene, p. 33

Fate

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic (December 1965)

Art

“The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

World

“These creatures were remarkably efficient, for once they were started they had no sense to stop and continued whirling for hours and hours…. All went well until a strange boy came to the place. He was the son of a retired officer in the Austrian Army. That urchin ate May-bugs alive and enjoyed them as tho they were the finest blue-point oysters. That disgusting site terminated my endeavors in this promising field and I have never since been able to touch a May-bug or any other insect for that matter.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla, ISBN 978-1614270843 , p. 45

Boy , Sense

“My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.”

Trevor Noah book Born a Crime

page 73
Born a Crime

Moms , Decision , World , Sense

“The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

Source: On Suicide

Life , Universe

“The world is your oyster…
… too bad you're allergic to shellfish.”

Paul Neilan American novelist

Source: Apathy and Other Small Victories

World

“It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.”

Pat Conroy book Beach Music

Source: Beach Music

Secret , Light , Water , Wine

“I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Food , Dead

“No, I do not weep at the world. I'm too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) American folklorist, novelist, short story writer

How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
Source: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
Context: I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

World , Business

“Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Kiss

“… like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?”

Robin McKinley book The Blue Sword

Source: The Blue Sword

“The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Life

“I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure.”

Anthony Bourdain book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Kitchen Confidential (2000)
Source: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Food

“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Polite Conversation (1738), Dialogue 2

“There, take (says Justice), take ye each a shell:
We thrive at Westminster on fools like you;
'T was a fat oyster,—live in peace,—adieu.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Reported in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, sixth edition (Yale University Press, 1970), p. 832: "Verbatim from Boileau", written c. 1740, published 1741.. Compare: "Tenez voilà", dit-elle, "à chacun une écaille, Des sottises d'autrui nous vivons au Palais; Messieurs, l'huître étoit bonne. Adieu. Vivez en paix", Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux, Epître II. (à M. l'Abbé des Roches).

Peace , Justice , Fools

“The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.”

Theodore Dreiser book The Financier

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXX

Life

“Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets—and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Recent Poetry”, p. 225
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

People , World , Time

“How far down the evolutionary scale shall we go? Shall we eat fish? What about shrimps? Oysters? To answer these questions we must bear in mind the central principle on which our concern for other beings is based. As I said … the only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests, in a strict, nonmetaphorical sense, a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian

Pleasure , Question , Sense , Fish

“"I like to think oysters transcend national barriers, Adrian." - Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii video, in an interview with director Adrian Maben.”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Miscellaneous

Thinking

“She said to Constance, parodying a line of poetry that attracted her, "In the United States, there one feels free." But she spoiled it by continuing, "Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster."”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 4, p. 181

Feeling

“I have to say that I haven't met an aggressive beggar in London. In New York, crossing 58th Street from the Plaza Oyster Bar to the Wyndham Hotel, I came up against a huge black man in a long, dark overcoat who said, in deep and threatening tones, "Give me fifty dollars!" I managed to ask him if he would be content with thirty-five and, rather to my surprise, he said, "All right, give me thirty-five dollars!"”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

And so the deal was done.
Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 24 : Giving Money to Beggars

“LeDuff’s argument (in Shock Art #37) that an image, once floated on the international art-sea, is a fish that anyone may grab with impunity, and make it his own, would not persuade an oyster. Questions of primacy are not to be scumbled in this way, which, had he been writing from a European perspective, he would understand, and be ashamed. The brutality of the American rape of the world’s exhibition spaces and organs of art-information has distanciated his senses. The historical aspects have been adequately trodden by others, but there is one category yet to be entertained—that of the psychological. The fact that LeDuff is replicated in every museum, in every journal, that one cannot turn one’s gaze without bumping into this raw plethora, LeDuff, LeDuff, LeDuff (whereas poor Bruno, the true progenitor, is eating the tops of bunches of carrots)—what has this done to LeDuff himself? It has turned him into a dead artist, but the corpse yet bounces in its grave, calling attention toward itself in the most unseemly manner. But truth cannot be swallowed forever. When the real story of low optical stimulus is indited, Bruno will be rectified.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“Letters to the Editore”, Guilty Pleasures (1974).

Truth , World , Art , Way

““The Great Egg must love human beings, he made a lot of them.”
“Same argument applies to oysters, only more so.””

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 13, “No more privacy than a guppy in an aquarium”, p. 127

Love

“One day I saw the combative Giants shortstop Billy Jurges confront umpire George Magerkurth, on a call Jurges violently objected to, the two men standing jaw to jaw, raging invective at each other. A faint spray of saliva emitted from Magerkurth's mouth; Jurges stepped back and uncorked his own oyster of spittle, right in the umpire's face. Magerkurth slugged Jurges, who slugged him back, and the two men rolled on the infield grass, clawing at each other until they were pried apart. Jurges, of course, was tossed out of the game and suspended for a spell, his place at shortstop taken over by the mild-mannered prematurely gray utility infielder, Lou Chiozza. The very next day, Chiozza ran out to short left field, chasing a pop fly, while in rushed Joe Moore, from his left field post. The result was a noisy collision, which sent Chiozza to the hospital, marking the first and only time one player's spittle had broken another player's leg.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From his Foreword https://books.google.com/books?id=jF7v30gqs_0C&pg=PA8 to The Early Polo Grounds (2009) by Chris Epting
Sports-related

Men , Game , Grass , Rage

“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Power and Laws of Thought (c. 1870)

“[The waiters'] eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet – paté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes.”

S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) American humorist, author, and screenwriter

The Rising Gorge (1961) p. 13

“To me [Sydney Opera House] looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don't waste any time echoing opera houses.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Postcard from Sydney'
Essays and reviews, Flying Visits (1984)

Time , Housing

“I arrive at the end of this review having done my duty as a critic. I have described the movie accurately and you have a good idea what you are in for if you go to see it. Most of you will not. I cannot argue with you. Some of you will — the brave and the curious. You embody the spirit of the man who first wondered what it would taste like to eat an oyster.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/gerry-2003 of Gerry (28 February 2003)
Reviews, Three star reviews

Idea

“I started thinking about charismatic psychopaths like Charles Manson and wondering what they were like as teenagers? They didn't just spring full-blown from oyster shells -- they had to hone the "people skills" that allowed them to become so manipulative as adults. Kids like that are growing up within our school systems and can exert tremendous control over their fellow students. I consider "Griffin" a cautionary tale about the danger of peer pressure.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

On the basis of her novel Killing Mr. Griffin (1978), interview in Absolute Write (2002)
1990–2002

People , School , Spring , Thinking

“I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," [Clovis] resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.”

Saki The Chronicles of Clovis

"The Match-Maker"
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)

Religion , Beauty , Forgiveness , Thinking

“The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time."”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 19

Life , Stupidity , World , Way

“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!”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

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!

World , Art , Thinking , Chance

“Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way. The more exotic the food, the more adventurous the serious eater, the higher the likelihood of later discomfort. I’m not going to deny myself the pleasures of morcilla sausage, or sashimi, or even ropa vieja at the local Cuban joint just because sometimes I feel bad a few hours after I’ve eaten them.”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

Kitchen Confidential (2000)

Pleasure , Food , Way , Feeling

“Never was the Church blessed with a stranger ally than this freest of free thinkers, who looked at churches very much as he would have looked at a layer of extinct oysters in a buried mud-bank. Strong's notion was that since the Church continued to exist, it probably served some necessary purpose in human economy, though he could himself no more understand the good of it than he could comprehend the use of human existence in any shape. Since men and women were here, idiotic and purposeless as they might be, they had what they chose to call a right to amuse themselves in their own way, and if this way made some happy without hurting others, Strong was ready enough to help.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Source: Esther: A Novel (1884), Ch. VIII

Women , Men , Way , Understanding

“It is just beyond Maryland, which is another obstacle. I heard the other day that God originally made oysters with legs, and afterward took them off, knowing that the people of Delaware would starve to death before they would run to catch anything.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Interview with the Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.

Death , God , People

“The world is my oyster
and now I’ll take a shower of stars.”

Sheri-D Wilson (1958) Canadian Spoken Word Poet

"Aphrodite's Aphrodisiac"
Goddess Gone Fishing for a Map of the Universe (2012)

World , Star

“We find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so qua mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 23

Pain , Suffering

“You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.”

Saki The Chronicles of Clovis

"The Match-Maker"
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)

Love , Soul , Wine

“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 (1613–1667) English clergyman

Sermon XX, Part II

World , Art , Thinking , Chance

“People who do not know what government is are not likely to know what democracy is either, for democracy is only what the soft inside of the oyster looks like.”

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892–1971) American political scientist

Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 35

People , Democracy

“There'll be what you might call a moment of inspiration – a way of seeing or feeling or remembering, an instance or a person that's made a large impression. Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning”

Carol Ann Duffy (1955) British writer and professor of contemporary poetry

Interviewed in The Guardian, December 4, 2005.

Truth , Way , Feeling , Personality

“It's so hard to understand why the world is your oyster but your future's a clam.”

Paul Weller (singer) (1958) English singer-songwriter, Guitarist

When You're Young (1979)

World , Understanding , Future

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 1

Feeling , Strong , Wine , Sea

“A little apish hat, couched fast to the pate, like an oyster;
French cambric ruffs, deep with a witness, starched to the purpose:
Delicate in speech; quaint in array; conceited in all points;
In courtly guiles, a passing singular odd man.”

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) English peer and courtier of the Elizabethan era

Source: About, Lines attributed to Gabriel Harvey by Thomas Nashe, said to have been written to ridicule Oxford.

“There, take," says Justice, "take ye each a shell;
We thrive at Westminster on fools like you.
'T was a fat oyster! live in peace,—adieu.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

Tenez, voilà, dit-elle, à chacun une écaille.
Des sottises d'autrui nous vivons au palais :
Messieurs, l'huître était bonne. Adieu. Vivez en paix.
Epître ii, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919); translation by Alexander Pope, Verbatim from Boileau.

Peace , Justice , Fools

“An oyster may be crossed in love.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan The Critic

Clio's Protest (1819).
The Critic (1779)

Love

“I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.”

Anthony Bourdain book A Cook's Tour

A Cook's Tour (2001)

Books , World , Fear , Boy

“Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Maximes et anecdotes (1795)

“What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.”

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892–1971) American political scientist

Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 24

Marriage , People , Communication , Dependency

“Why do I—the original advocate of realignment on the Left—object to the Lib-Lab pact? Precisely because I do not think it will lead to realignment. For one thing, the Gaitskellites have fled the field. The Labour Party looks and behaves more and more as the servants of the trade union leaders…When the election comes, either the Labour Party win—and if that happens they will say "Thank you very much" to us and go on with more collectivism—or they lose, and we shall be tarred with their failure…Don't let us become oysters to Carpenter Jim, however genuinely benevolent he may seem.”

Jo Grimond (1913–1993) British soldier, politician and academic

The Daily Mail (26 July, 1977).

Failure , Thinking

“Dear Miss Manners: What is the proper way to eat potato chips?
Gentle Reader: With a knife and fork. A fruit knife and an oyster fork, to be specific. Good heavens, what is the world coming to? Miss Manners does not mind explaining the finer points of gracious living, but she feels that anyone without the sense to pick up a potato chip and stuff it in their face should probably not be running around loose on the streets.”

Judith Martin (1938) American etiquette expert

Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

World , Way , Feeling , Sense

“Never serve oysters during a month that has no paycheck in it.”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

The Bachelor Home Companion (1986)

“Sorrow, it is said, will make even an oyster feel poetical.”

Davy Crockett (1786–1836) American politician

On being inspired to make an attempt at poetry, Ch. 2
Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas (1836)
Context: Sorrow, it is said, will make even an oyster feel poetical. I never tried my hand at that sort of writing but on this particular occasion such was my state of feeling, that I began to fancy myself inspired; so I took pen in hand, and as usual I went ahead.

Feeling

“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) American folklorist, novelist, short story writer

How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)

School , Soul , Business , Strong

“The world is your oyster if you’re unafraid to tell your own story and keep it universally appealing. But you have reason to be afraid of making live action children’s drama in Australia if the system is dismantled.”

Jonathan M. Shiff Australian television producer

Source: Interview with Jonathan Shiff https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen-news/2018/06-18-international-tv-sales-snapshot-for-2017/part-4-interview-with-jonathan-shiff (18 June 2018)

World , Universe , Making love , Children

“When you think about it from a native plant perspective," Oyster says."Johnny Apple seed was a fucking biological terrorist.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 19

Thinking

“Every man that has felt pain, knows how few the comforts are that can gladden him to whom health is denied. I fed Hodge valerian to ease his agonies. I bought oysters for his delight, these being soft, and the best meat for his toothless jaws. I went for them myself.”

Robin Saikia British writer and actor

Source: A Very Fine Cat Indeed: A Dramatic Monologue (2020), p. 25

Pain , Health

“But we never want to talk about sadness without leaving a scar. We don't even realize that behind the wound inside the oyster's body is a beautiful pearl.”

Titon Rahmawan

#The sadness

Beauty , Sadness