Jimmy Buffett
Musician, Author
"Shells sink, dreams float. Life's good on our boat."
Shells quotes
Shells
179 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Lew Wallace
Author, Politician
"Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others."
Sappho
Poet
"I took my lyre and said: come now, my heavenly tortoise shell: become a speaking instrument."
Frances Harper
Author, Activist
"Apparent failure may hold in its rough shell the germs of a success that will blossom in time, and bear fruit throughout eternity."
Huston Smith
Philosopher
"Walnuts have a shell, and they have a kernel. Religions are the same. They have an essence, but then they have a protective coating. This is not the only way to put it. But it's my way. So the kernels are the same. However, the shells are different."
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Topics related to Shells
Browse quotes that often appear alongside shells — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Shells quotes (page 1 of 9)
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"The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell."
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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."
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"What strikes the oyster shell doesn't damage the pearl."
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"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."
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"I have a large sea shell collection which I keep scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen it."
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"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man."
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"Our theories of the eternal are as valuable as are those which a chick which has not broken its way through its shell might form of the outside world."
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"...a young man, Jamaican, perhaps, his head circled in a scarf with sunbleached dreadlocks on piled on top, looking like a plate of soft-shell crabs."
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"I'm scared," she said. "These days I feel like a snail without a shell." "I'm scared too," I said. "I feel like a frog without any webs." She looked up and smiled. Wordlessly we walked over to a shaded part of the building and held each other and kissed, a shell-less snail and a webless frog."
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"It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire."
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"Tried living in the real world instead of a shell, but I was bored before I even began."
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"If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked?"
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"Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover its meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons."
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"We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell."
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"Dislodging a green nut from it's shell is almost impossible, but let it dry and the lightest tap will do it."
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"Oh my friend, all that you see of me is a shell, the rest belongs to love."
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"The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant."
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"Not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself... Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote; or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost."
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"It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?"
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"Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were caricatures - they were easy to spot. They were almost psychopaths. But it's much harder to spot problems at companies like Royal Dutch [Shell]."
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