Eggs

A carton of six eggs

Bacon and chicken eggs being cooked in a skillet

Eggs are organic vessels in which embryos first begins to develop. Reptile eggs, bird eggs, and monotreme eggs, which are laid out of water, are surrounded by a protective shell, either flexible or inflexible. Eggs have been eaten by mankind for hundreds of thousands of years. Bird and reptile eggs consist of a protective eggshell, albumen (egg white), and vitellus (egg yolk), contained within various thin membranes. Popular choices for egg consumption are chicken, duck, quail, roe, and caviar, but the egg most often consumed by humans is the chicken egg, by a wide margin.

Quotes

• For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
  • Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (2002).

• The link between eating eggs and high cholesterol is just another case of malscientific nonsense.
  • T. Beale, Eggs Do Not Raise Cholesterol, Vox Popoli, 24 September 2024

• I am egg and always will be, and we are eggs and always will be. Fried eggs. Or rotten eggs. Boiled eggs. Or scrambled eggs. Poached eggs. Or round eggs. Eggs. Eggs. Eggs.
  • Giannina Braschi, Empire of Dreams (2011).

• Going as if he trod upon eggs.
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III. Sect, II. Memb. 3; reported as a proverb in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 640.

• A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
  • Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1877), ch. 8.

• 'And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.

  'It's very provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, 'to be called an egg — very!'

  'I said you looked like an egg, Sir,' Alice gently explained. 'And some eggs are very pretty, you know,' she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of compliment.

  • Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, Ch. 6.

• O the hard-boiled eggs! There are two corner-stones necessary for a picnic — sunshine and hard-boiled eggs.
  • Norman Gale, A June Romance (Rugby: George E. Over, 1894), p. 82.

• The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.
  • Hermann Hesse, Demian (1919), p. p. 166. Variant translation: The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world. Translation by W. J. Strachan.

• When she saw me cooking eggs, she thought I was back at it.
  • Lil Wayne, "Stuntin' Like My Daddy", Like Father Like Son (2006), Cash Money Records Inc.

• A box without hinges, key or lid,
  Yet golden treasure inside is hid.
  • J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937), Ch. 5.

Proverbs

• Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow.
  • Reported in Strauss, Emmanuel, Dictionary of European Proverbs (Routledge, 1998), ISBN 0415160502, p. 75.

• Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
  • First recorded 1662, G. Toriano, Italian proverbial phrases ("To put all one's eggs in a paniard"); 1710, Samuel Palmer, Moral essays on proverbs ("Don't venture all your eggs in one basket")
  • Reported in Apperson, GL (2006). Dictionary of proverbs. Wordsworth. p. 170. ISBN 978-1840223118. 

• Eggs and oaths are soon broken.
  • Reported in Strauss, Emmanuel, Dictionary of European Proverbs (Routledge, 1998), ISBN 0415160502, p. 765.

• You can't have an omelette unless you break the egg.
  • Meaning: You may have to sacrifice something in order to gain something else.
  • Reported in Mieder, Wolfgang; Kingsbury, Stewart A.; Harder, Kelsie B., A Dictionary of American proverbs (1992), p. 259.