1.
Said one oyster to a neighboring oyster, "I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress." And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence, "Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without." At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, "Yes, you are well and whole; but the pain that your neighbor bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty."
Khalil Gibran
2.
Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around.
Sylvia Earle
4.
It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.
Jean-Paul Sartre
5.
OYSTER, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails! The shells are sometimes given to the poor.
Ambrose Bierce
6.
I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead - not sick, not wounded - dead.
Woody Allen
7.
A loaf of bread, the Walrus said, Is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides Are very good indeed-- Now if you're ready, Oysters, dear, We can begin to feed!
Lewis Carroll
8.
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question.../ Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' / Let us go and make our visit"' 'I'm in love with you,' he said quietly.
John Green
9.
Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.
Theodore Roosevelt
10.
I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance!
Christopher Marlowe
11.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats 5 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10 Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
T. S. Eliot
12.
The world is your oyster. It's up to you to find the pearls.
Chris Gardner
13.
A man may as well open an oyster without a knife, as a lawyer's mouth without a fee.
Barten Holyday
15.
Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid.
Tom Robbins
16.
Give me oysters and beer, for dinner every day of the year, and I'll be fine.
Jimmy Buffett
17.
Rich honesty dwells like a miser, Sir, in a poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster.
William Shakespeare
18.
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
Federico Fellini
20.
Obviously, if you don't love life, you can't enjoy an oyster.
Eleanor Clark
21.
My role in life is that of the grain of sand to the oyster-it irritates the oyster and out comes a pearl.
Ross Perot
23.
I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Zora Neale Hurston
24.
I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.
Oscar Wilde
25.
I am in a very unsettled condition, as the oyster said when they poured melted butter all over his back.
Edward Lear
26.
Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply 'In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and Champagne.'
Isadora Duncan
28.
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
29.
Of all mushrooms commonly consumed, oyster mushrooms in the genus Pleurotus stand out as exceptional allies for improving human and environmental health. These mushrooms enjoy a terrific reputation as the easiest to cultivate, richly nutritious and medicinally supportive.
Paul Stamets
30.
The Japanese are hard to understand, but once you do the world is your oyster.
Paul Smith
31.
The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.
Oscar Wilde
32.
In such a world as ours the idle man is not so much a biped as a bivalve; and the wealth which breeds idleness, of which the English peerage is an example, and of which we are beginning to abound in specimens in this country, is only a sort of human oyster bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worms' banquet.
Horace Mann
33.
Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
34.
What strikes the oyster shell
doesn't damage the pearl.
Rumi
35.
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
36.
They luxuriated in the feeling of deep and all pervading satisfaction, a feeling of knowing absolutely that all was well with the world and them and that the world was not only their oyster it was also their linguine with clam sauce. Not only were all things possible, but all things were theirs.
Hubert Selby, Jr.
37.
It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
Stephen King
38.
He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
Hector Hugh Munro
39.
Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.
Jan Morris
40.
Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude, but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness.'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.
Ray Romano
42.
Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.
Nicolas Chamfort
43.
O Oysters,' said the Carpenter, You've had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?' But answer came there none - And this was scarcely odd, because They'd eaten every one.
Lewis Carroll
44.
The world is your oyster. Yes, but in that oyster is the pearl; and to get to the pearl one has to first discard the shell and the flesh.
Ian Gardner
45.
People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster.
Alistair Cooke
46.
The pearl on my beloved's neck, Afflicted sore the oyster!
Bhartrhari
47.
Before modern medicine, would pussies just generally rot up inside you and fall out of you like spoiled oysters on the sidewalk?
Doug Stanhope
48.
She knows no difference 'twixt head and privities who devours immense oysters at midnight.
Juvenal
50.
We also have favourite place in France, called Charlot Premier in Nice, which does excellent oysters.
Roger Moore