The difficult and interesting truth is that we really can’t know other people fully—we can barely know ourselves fully. We’re all eggs in that way, incapable of knowing who we’ll become, as time presses onwards and forces us out of our shells.

No one ever thought of changing the shape of the egg because it expresses a perfect idea.

"Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter." - Carl Jung

Eggs are symbols of regeneration and rebirth. Each spring, possibility returns in thousands and thousands of eggs. Jellylike eggs of fish and frogs shimmer in shallow waters. In nests of all kinds, turtles and other reptiles lay eggs contained in leathery membranes, while birds lay and brood variously tinged and dappled eggs whose hard protective shells are both permeable to respiratory gasses and relatively impermeable to water.

Alchemy depicted the germ of the egg contained in the yolk as the “sun-point,” the infinitesimally small, invisible “dot” from which all being has its origin. It is also the creative “fire-point” within ourselves, the “soul in the midpoint of the heart,” the quintessence or golden germ “that is set in motion by the hen’s warmth” of our devoted attention.

The egg is the mysterious “center” around which unconscious energies move in spiral-like evolutions, gradually bringing the vital substance to light.

The egg evokes the beginning, the simple, the source.

I have this theory that when artists use eggs in their work, often they are simply “honoring” them. In other words, they are pointing to the egg somehow: so that we can see it anew, as if for the first time.

“The most beautiful thing that exists is an egg,” he said during a panel discussion at Cooper Hewitt in 2008 in conjunction with his award. “Its form is just perfect.”

It was a mysterious beginning, full of potential