Top 100 The Clay Quotes
#1. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds
whatever we want.
Lao-Tzu
#2. My mate is really, really weird.
She is also absolutely covered in brown, mushy clay.
She laughs and holds a large lump up to show it to me. Her mouth moves, and she makes enough noise to scare away a group of birds near the shore.
She is so, so strange.
Shay Savage
#3. You are the human clay," Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. "And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece.
Rick Yancey
#4. To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
W. H. Auden
#5. The sightless Milton, with his hair Around his placid temples curled; And Shakespeare at his side,-a freight, If clay could think and mind were weight, For him who bore the world!
William Wordsworth
#6. When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream ...
William Butler Yeats
#7. I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#8. In creation myths, a god shapes mud or clay into living form, much like a potter throws a pot or a sculptor reveals the statue within a block of marble. But a writer has to create his own clay or stone before he can begin shaping life from it.
Stuart Dybek
#9. Don't pursue happiness!
Life is as short as a sigh.
The dust of people that were once famous
turn with the reddish clay on the wheel you are
looking at. The universe is a fata morgana;
life is a dream.
Omar Khayyam
#10. I called Clay from the SUV.
"How'd it go at the paper?" he asked.
"She called me perky."
"Ouch.
Kelley Armstrong
#11. People who spend their time searching for feet of clay will miss not only the heavens wherein God moves in His majesty and power, but God's majesty as He improves and shapes a soul.
Neal A. Maxwell
#12. And there it is, proof if proof were needed, that though God may mould the clay and fashion some of us hale, some strong, some beautiful, inside we make ourselves, from foolish things, breakable, fragile things:
Mark Lawrence
#13. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.
Janet Fitch
#14. Within the shadows of honor, courage often walks in silence.
-Engraved on the monument Clay built
Lorraine Heath
#15. The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for whom the word 'pen' had two syllables. He people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready
so who was she to advise me on anything?
David Sedaris
#16. And I really loved sculpting. My brother and I would do full human figures with clay and Plasticine - liver, intestines, the heart - fill them with ketchup and throw them from the roof. So I was an artistic but very morbid kid.
Guillermo Del Toro
#17. A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pygmy-body to decay, And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay. A daring pilot in extremity; Pleas'd with the danger, when the waves went high He sought the storms.
John Dryden
#18. When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel.
Elizabeth McCracken
#19. I was digging in the backyard to get my own clay and making pottery. And then I started taking pictures and built my own darkroom. I would go out at six in the morning and just take pictures.
Steven Klein
#21. When political correctness first started coming around, it ruined Andrew Dice Clay and Eddie Murphy's stand-up career. Sam Kinison died at just the right time, 'cause no one was going to tolerate what he was saying anymore either.
Artie Lange
#22. Clay is used to make vases, but it is the emptiness they contain that makes them useful.
Laozi
#23. Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.
Michael Lewis
#24. In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet
("Oil and Blood")
W.B.Yeats
#25. Representative William McK. Springer, remarks in the House, quoting Henry Clay: As for me, I would rather be right than be President. Reed: Well, the gentleman will never be either.
Bill Vaughan
#26. Raindrops fall from clouds of gray.
The fragile flowers grow.
Teardrops seem all I can say.
They speak of endless woe.
Your fingers wipe my grief away.
A seed of love you sow.
A hardened heart reverts to clay.
You mold my love just so.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#27. I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.
Barbara Kingsolver
#28. Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
William James
#29. The Mercy of Allah is an Ocean, Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean.It only has to open it's beak
Leila Aboulela
#30. To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
James Baldwin
#31. Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.
Eric Hoffer
#32. O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.
Anonymous
#33. That I had loved not as I should. A creature made of clay. When the angel woos the clay, he'll lose his wings at the dawn of day
Jean Haus
#34. But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth.
Marisha Pessl
#35. If you are playing bad you are going to lose here, on clay, on ice, or on the beach.
Rafael Nadal
#36. I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.
Robert Boswell
#37. You should not look at what the person used to do, rather you should
look at what kind of person they are today. The one who gets bogged
down about people's pasts, is just like Iblees who said to Allaah,
"You created me from fire and you created him from clay".
Ibn Taymiyyah
#38. Afflictions sent by providence melt the constancy of the noble minded, but confirm the obduracy of the vile, as the same furnace that liquefies the gold, hardens the clay Charles Caleb Colton.
Charles Caleb Colton
#39. She started awake from a dream in which their cave had collapsed and was slowly crushing her to death, and discovered that Clay had rolled over on top of her in the middle of the night.
Tui T. Sutherland
#40. Wow," Clay said. "Never thought I'd see the day a woman walked away from you. And in the middle of a the desert." He cracked up and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. "I'm definitely tweeting this.
Robin Bielman
#41. I am puffed clay, blown up and set down. That I fall like Adam is not surprising: I plunge, waft, arc, pour, and dive. The surprise is how good the wind feels on my face as I fall. And the other surprise is that I ever rise at all
Annie Dillard
#42. If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
Peter Greenaway
#43. I got to eavesdrop at a window. As Clay said, I did have another option. I could wait in the car and let them fill me in later. So, eavesdropping it was.
Kelley Armstrong
#44. People naturally are attracted to the best of anything. Top people want to work where the best and most incredible products on the planet are designed, produced, and sold.
Clay Clark
#45. A child is imprinted not by simply teaching. But their attention is like soft clay. The attention field of adults is stratified. They are like hard clay and we push them on each side of the child's attention field.
Frederick Lenz
#46. He [Cassius Clay] became a Black Muslim, which is a pseudo-religion for unbright neurotics who feel the need to hate all white people.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#47. I have known others who could use totems of their own to turn reality inside out. To reshape it like the soft clay it is. There was Craddock McDermott, who claimed that his spirit existed in a favorite suit of his.
Joe Hill
#48. Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan
Repeating us by rote:
For him her Old World moulds aside she threw
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new.
James Russell Lowell
#49. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. Clay is so young and has been misled by the wrong people ... He might as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan.
Floyd Patterson
#51. They came back
To widows,
To fatherless children,
To screams, to sobbing.
The men came back
As little clay jars
Full of sharp cinders.
Aeschylus
#52. Tiny pieces of clay that they would never find, that would be absorbed into that earth from which they came. The
Yaa Gyasi
#53. Clay is molded to form a cup, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the cup depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a room, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the room depends. Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility.
Laozi
#54. Oh her deathbed, when her hands could no longer weave or paint or mold clay, she'd told stories and filled them with the colors she loved.
Veronica Rossi
#55. There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked - most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don't like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine.
Charles Bukowski
#56. A field of clay touched by the genius of man becomes a castle.
Og Mandino
#57. By their complying with your request to leave they [the Saints in Clay County] are surrendering some of the dearest rights guaranteed in the Constitution of our country; and that human nature can be driven to a certain extent when it will yield no further.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#58. Is there anything more unjust than to build gold and brass and iron on poor, well-meaning clay,
and then blame the clay when the whole image falls into dust?
Margaret Deland
#59. [The internet] ought to be like clay, rather than a sculpture that you observe from a distance.
Tim Berners-Lee
#60. We are like clay containers filled with a beautiful treasure. So often it has been the love of Jesus expressed through the life of someone I know that has made a difference in my life.
Roy Lessin
#61. Cassius Clay must be beaten and the Black Muslims' scourge removed from boxing.
Floyd Patterson
#62. You know growing up in Sweden meant we had a lot of rain when we played tennis. We were taught on clay courts but because of the weather, we had to go indoors a lot.
Bjorn Borg
#63. At the end of the day, your level of success is going to be determined by the power of your imagination, the level of your determination and tenacity.
Clay Clark
#64. Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#65. ... [Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can't avoid that.
Richard Linklater
#66. Christians well know that the much-decorated statue of the Church, as it now stands, is not of pure chiseled marble, but of clay, cemented together by blood and tears and hardened in the fires of hatred and persecution.
Virchand Gandhi
#67. You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
John Updike
#68. The Wise (Minstrel or Sage,) out of their books are clay; But in their books, as from their graves they rise. Angels
that, side by side, upon our way, Walk with and warn us!
Bill Vaughan
#69. YOU WILL DRINK THE COFFEE UNTIL I CAN SEE MY FACE IN THE BOTTOM OF THE CUP!" I did not mean to roar. "But it's a clay cup." "I DO NOT CARE!" He finished the coffee. "You did not have to finish it," I said, because I could perceive that he was rebuilding the Great Wall of China with shit bricks.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#70. The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.
Marshall McLuhan
#71. What do young, budding artists do, but go to law school? I had creative periods now and again, but it wasn't until I was practicing law that I really needed a creative outlet. I'd come home from long days at the office and draw, paint, and sculpt from clay, wire - even candy.
Nathan Sawaya
#72. For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
Dan Simmons
#73. If you are expecting Paul to read the Bible like it was set in stone, you will find yourself getting pretty nervous. For Paul, now that Jesus has come, the Bible was more like clay to be molded.
Peter Enns
#74. I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.
Abraham Lincoln
#75. My name is Clay Jannon and those were the days when I rarely touched paper.
Robin Sloan
#76. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their characters assume in the books written about them.
Janet Malcolm
#77. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning. The
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#78. These guys are just flying through the air and I'm capturing them in the split second and putting it into a work of art, via clay to the bronze.
Richard MacDonald
#79. I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.
Czeslaw Milosz
#80. In the modern game, you're a clay court specialist, a grass court specialist
or a hard court specialist ... or you're Roger Federer.
Jimmy Connors
#81. Some make you sing and some make you scream. One makes you wish that you'd never been seen. But there's a shop on the corner that's selling papier
mache, making bullet-proof faces, Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay.
If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.
David Bowie
#82. My unassisted heart is barren clay, That of its native self can nothing feed: Of good and pious works Thou art the seed, That quickens only where Thou sayest it may: Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way No man can find it: Father! Thou must lead. These words will repay
A.W. Tozer
#83. The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay.
Martin Luther
#84. My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.
John Henrik Clarke
#85. The greatest mystery a man ever learned, is to know how to control the human mind, and bring every faculty and power of the same in subjection to Jesus Christ; this is the greatest mystery we have to learn while in these tabernacles of clay.
Brigham Young
#86. But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.
Isaiah 64 8
#87. My mom's the one I look up to for everything. I feel like I'm a lump of clay and she's moulding me into a woman.
Chloe Grace Moretz
#88. There was never much question as to what I was going to do in life, because working with clay was what I could do ... there are things I watch my hand do that are almost thoughtless. I can remember the moment of learning them. It is knowledge you have in the hand.
Charles Simonds
#89. In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.
Alberto Manguel
#90. Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.
Honore De Balzac
#91. Our love was born
outside the walls,
in the wind,
in the night,
in the earth,
and that's why the clay and the flower,
the mud and the roots
know your name.
Pablo Neruda
#92. Where the Tennessee River, like a silver snake, winds her way through the clay hills of Alabama, sits high on these hills, my home town, Florence.
William Christopher Handy
#93. This clay, so strong of heart, of sense so fine,
Surely such clay is more than half divine
'Tis only fools speak evil of the clay,
The very stars are made of clay like mine.
Omar Khayyam
#94. According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.
Steven Pinker
#95. I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.
David Levithan
#96. The future was clay, to be moulded day by day, but the past was bedrock, immutable.
Sidney Sheldon
#97. According to Jewish legend, only the very wisest and very holiest rabbis had the power to make golems, animated servants of clay. Strictly speaking, the golem is not in the same class with Frankenstein's monster, because the golem is neither alive nor dead. He is, rather, the ancestor of all robots.
Kage Baker
#98. Children are born as individuals. If we fail to see that, if we see them as clay to be molded in any shape we like, the tougher ones will fight back and end up spiteful and wild, while the less strong will lose that uniqueness they were born with.
Melvin Konner
#99. What's the difference between a Dice Clay concert and a Klan rally? Nothing. Trick question.
Bobcat Goldthwait
#100. The clay of White Fang had been molded until he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.
Jack London
