Shells Quotes

• Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.

  Rick Bragg

  Inspirational, Life, Matter

  Rick Bragg (2010). “All Over but the Shoutin'”, p.21, Vintage

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• Those with the softest hearts build the hardest shells.

  Richard Paul Evans

  Heart, Hardest

  Richard Paul Evans (2000). “The Locket”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

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• I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Beautiful, Fun, Humble

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1975). “GIFT FROM THE SEA”

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• Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Birthday, Ambition, Ego

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2002). “Wisdom from Gift from the Sea”, p.43, Peter Pauper Press, Inc.

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• One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Beautiful, Beach, Aging

  ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH (1967). “SELECTIONS FROM GIFT FROM THE SEA”

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• Sometimes the way through someone's tough outer shell is to do something obvious, thoughtful and sweet.

  Amy Dickinson

  Sweet, Women, Thoughtful

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• I've learned that under everyone's hard shell is someone who wants to be appreciated and loved.

  Andy Rooney

  Compassion, Want, Appreciated

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• Beauty ...is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Dark, Reflection

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.208, Wordsworth Editions

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• I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

  Isaac Newton

  Inspirational, Success, Trust

  Quoted in Christian Monitor, and Religious Intelligencer, 4 July 1812. An almost identical quotation by Newton, said to have been uttered "a little before he died," appears in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, published in 1820 but extant in manuscript form from around 1730. A paraphrase of Newton's words was printed in a note in a 1797 edition of TheWorks of Alexander Pope.

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• All knowledge and understanding of the Universe was no more than playing with stones and shells on the seashore of the vast imponderable ocean of truth.

  Isaac Newton

  Ocean, Understanding, Stones

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• Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

  Khalil Gibran

  Inspirational, Life, Spiritual

  Khalil Gibran (2014). “The Prophet - Der Prophet”, p.84, Lulu.com

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• Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

  Cyril Connolly

  Beach, Children, Home

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• maggie and milly and molly and may went down to the beach (to play one day) and maggie discovered a shell that sang so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and milly befriended a stranded star whose rays five languid fingers were and molly was chased by a horrible thing which raced sideways while blowing bubbles and may come home with a smooth rounded stone as small as a world and as big as alone. for whatever we loose (like a you or a me) it is always ourselves we find in the sea.

  e. e. cummings

  Beach, Stars, Home

  E. E. Cummings (1983). “Hist Whist: And Other Poems for Children”, p.13, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I am pure light, not just a fistful of clay. The shell is not me, I came as the royal pearl within. Look at me not with outward eye but with inward vision of the heart; Follow me there and see how unencumbered we become.

  Rumi

  Healing, Heart, Eye

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• We feel our shell keeps us safe, but it crushes us and others, and keeps out light and sun.

  Taisen Deshimaru

  Crush, Light, Safe

  "Zen Miracles : Finding Peace in an Insane World" by Brenda Shoshanna, (p. 80), 2002.

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• We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell.

  Plato

  Oysters, Body, Bounds

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• Compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Compassion, Should, Hard

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.108, Penguin

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• The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  Dna, Culture, World

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• As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.

  James Hollis

  Children, Sea, Sound

  James Hollis, David H. Rosen (2002). “The Archetypal Imagination”, p.119, Texas A&M University Press

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• There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

  Jodi Picoult

  Character, Irritation, People

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper - Movie Tie-In: A Novel”, p.350, Simon and Schuster

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• The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

  Andrew Carnegie

  Inspirational, Success, Leadership

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• Grace has to be the loveliest word in the English language. It embodies almost every attractive quality we hope to find in others. Grace is a gift of the humble to the humiliated. Grace acknowledges the ugliness of sin by choosing to see beyond it. Grace accepts a person as someone worthy of kindness despite whatever grime or hard-shell casing keeps him or her separated from the rest of the world. Grace is a gift of tender mercy when it makes the least sense.

  Charles R. Swindoll

  Kindness, Humble, Grace

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• Gather a shell from the strewn beach
  And listen at its lips: they sigh
  The same desire and mystery,
  The echo of the whole sea's speech.

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  Beach, Echoes, Sea

  "The Sea-Limits". "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th edition", 1919.

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• What we wear is the shell of who we are.

  Audrey Tautou

  Who We Are

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• Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Science, Oysters, Sea

  Leonardo (da Vinci), Carlo Pedretti, Martin Kemp, Owen Gingerich, American Museum of Natural History (1996). “Codex Leicester: a masterpiece of science”

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