Quotes about clay (194 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Give All to Love, st. 4
1840s, Poems (1847)

Love , God , Parting

“When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

God , Soul

“All these trod the road to Hell, removing from this house of clay to the pit of perdition. The enemy's country was full, as Hell is full, of wounded who had died on the road. The lowest pit was gorged with miscreants who had surrendered their souls to the lord of Hell. In whatever direction one from the army of Islam hastened, he found everywhere a self-willed one dead; whatever march the illustrious camp made in the wake of the fugitives, it found no foot-space without its prostrate foe. All the Hindus slain, abject and mean, By matchlock-stones, like the Elephants' lords, Many hills of their bodies were seen, And from each hill a fount of running blood.”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

https://archive.org/stream/baburnama017152mbp/baburnama017152mbp_djvu.Txt

Soul , Hell , Housing , Dead

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

Frédéric Bastiat book The Law

The Law (1850)

People , Nature

“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 of clay, in the way Adam was fashioned.”

Martin Luther book Table Talk

752 http://books.google.com/books?id=ZUAuAAAAYAAJ&q=%22The+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+of+clay+in+the+way+Adam+was+fashioned%22&pg=PA307#v=onepage
Table Talk (1569)

God , Way , Fashion

“If you are playing bad you are going to lose here, on clay, on ice, or on the beach.”

Rafael Nadal (1986) Spanish tennis player

Preparing to play at the 2006 US Open http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/low/tennis/5295932.stm

“There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 20 (Vintage 2003)

Feeling

“This is the legend of Cassius Clay,
The most beautiful fighter in the world today.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

"I am the Greatest" (1964) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZU_AvPPIQY
Context: This is the legend of Cassius Clay,
The most beautiful fighter in the world today.
He talks a great deal, and brags indeed-y,
Of a muscular punch that's incredibly speed-y.
The fistic world was dull and weary,
But with a champ like Liston, things had to be dreary.
Then someone with color and someone with dash,
Brought fight fans a-runnin' with cash.
This brash young boxer is something to see
And the heavyweight championship is his destiny.

World , Beauty

“Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

Change , Dead

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

The Lake Isle of Innisfree http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1641/, st. 1
The Rose (1893)
Context: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

“!-- Your kind letter of the 25th ult., and the express package containing the bronze medal of -->Mr. Clay, during my whole political life, I have loved and revered as a teacher and leader.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter to Daniel Ullmann (1 February 1861); quoted in "Why Abraham Lincoln Was a Whig" by Daniel Walker Howe, The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Volume 16, Issue 1 (Winter 1995) http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0016.105?view=text;rgn=main; also in We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861 (2013) by William J. Cooper, p. 72 http://books.google.com/books?id=meYLTCRlHaQC&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=Lincoln+%22I+have+loved+and+revered%22&source=bl&ots=A-QLTNlkSN&sig=F0MdGo6rkAVKc3tIQSs0Xp4AdSY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fmpQUv22LpCi4APhj4HoDQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Lincoln%20%22I%20have%20loved%20and%20revered%22&f=false
1860s

Love , Life , Teachers

“And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they’d been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots—roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loan, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep—in home.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 23 (p. 227)

Sadness , Home , Mountain , Understanding

“Another illustration. When for the first time I met Mister Clay, the other day in the cars, in front of us sat an old gentleman with an enormous wen upon his neck. Everybody would say the wen was a great evil, and would cause the man's death after a while. But you couldn't cut it out, for he'd bleed to death in a minute. But would you engraft the seeds of that wen on the necks of sound and healthy men? He must endure and be patient, hoping for possible relief. The wen represents slavery on the neck of this country. This only applies to those who think slavery is wrong. Those who think it right would consider the snake a jewel, and the wen an ornament.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Death , Men , Hope , Cars

“And if you should say that the shells were carried by the waves, being empty and dead, I say that where the dead went they were not far removed from the living; for in these mountains living ones are found, which are recognisable by the shells being in pairs; and they are in a layer where there are no dead ones; and a little higher up they are found, where they were thrown by the waves, all the dead ones with their shells separated, near to where the rivers fell into the sea, to a great depth; like the Arno which fell from the Gonfolina near to Monte Lupo, where it left a deposit of gravel which may still be seen, and which has agglomerated; and of stones of various districts, natures, and colours and hardness, making one single conglomerate. And a little beyond the sandstone conglomerate a tufa has been formed, where it turned towards Castel Florentino; farther on, the mud was deposited in which the shells lived, and which rose in layers according to the levels at which the turbid Arno flowed into that sea. And from time to time the bottom of the sea was raised, depositing these shells in layers, as may be seen in the cutting at Colle Gonzoli, laid open by the Arno which is wearing away the base of it; in which cutting the said layers of shells are very plainly to be seen in clay of a bluish colour, and various marine objects are found there. And if the earth of our hemisphere is indeed raised by so much higher than it used to be, it must have become by so much lighter by the waters which it lost through the rift between Gibraltar and Ceuta; and all the more the higher it rose, because the weight of the waters which were thus lost would be added to the earth in the other hemisphere. And if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other amidst the mud, and not in regular steps and layers — as we see them now in our time.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XVI Physical Geography

Mountain , Nature , Water , Time

“A vase of unbaked clay, when broken, may be remoulded, but not a baked one.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

“Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.”

Robert Browning Rabbi ben Ezra

Source: Dramatis Personae (1864), Rabbi Ben Ezra, Line 157.

God , Fools , Soul , Change

“If you wish to make a figure in marble, first make one of clay, and when you have finished it, let it dry and place it in a case which should be large enough, after the figure is taken out of it, to receive also the marble, from which you intend to reveal the figure in imitation of the one in clay.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XI The Notes on Sculpture

“Thirty spokes unite at the single hub;
It is the empty space which makes the wheel useful.
Mold clay to form a bowl;
It is the empty space which makes the bowl useful.
Cut out windows and doors;
It is the empty space which makes the room useful.”

Laozi book Tao Te Ching

Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 11

“Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. 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.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator

Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. I : The Craft
Context: I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. 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 squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.

Sleep , Time

“Another illustration. When for the first time I met Mister Clay, the other day in the cars, in front of us sat an old gentleman with an enormous wen upon his neck. Everybody would say the wen was a great evil, and would cause the man's death after a while. But you couldn't cut it out, for he'd bleed to death in a minute. But would you engraft the seeds of that wen on the necks of sound and healthy men? He must endure and be patient, hoping for possible relief. The wen represents slavery on the neck of this country. This only applies to those who think slavery is wrong. Those who think it right would consider the snake a jewel, and the wen an ornament.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Country , Thinking , Death , Men

“I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Feeling , Happiness

“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 book The Fire Next Time

Variant: To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
Source: The Fire Next Time

Life , History , Past , Season

“Data! data! data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

Source: The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

“Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Stupidity

“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 Broken

Source: Broken

Cars , Waiting

“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 (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Love , Flowers , Night

“An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

People

“I dream in fire but work in clay.”

Arthur Machen (1863–1947) Welsh author and mystic

Dreams

“Did you use a chainsaw?" Joey said. "I seem to recall you like chainsawa."
"There wasn't a power outlet." Clay turned to me. "That's what I want for Father's Day, darling. A gas powered chainsaw.”

Kelley Armstrong book Frostbitten

Source: Frostbitten

“God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

God , Friendship

“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 book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Sadness , Beauty

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

“Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.”

David Byrne (1952) Scottish alternative rock musician and promoter of world music

Source: Bicycle Diaries

Future

“About Daniel: Two, he hates Clay
*
Five, he really hates Clay.
*
Nine, he really, really, hates Clay.”

Kelley Armstrong book Bitten

Source: Bitten

Hate

“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 (1964) writer, playwright

Source: Minaret

Tree

“You cannot expect stone to be as pliable as clay.”

Anne Brontë book Agnes Grey

Source: Agnes Grey

“Uh-uh. We've played this game before. I hide. You never seek. I'm a bit slow on the uptake, but I'm beginning to sense a pattern."
- Clay to Elena”

Kelley Armstrong book Bitten

Source: Bitten

Game , Sense

“Love her as in childhood
Through feeble, old and grey.
For you’ll never miss a mother’s love
Till she’s buried beneath the clay.”

Frank McCourt book Angela's Ashes

Source: Angela's Ashes

Love , Childhood

“No, reprobate! You are a castaway - be off, or I'll hurt you seriously! I'll have you all modeled in wax and clay; and the first who passes the limits I fix, shall — I'll not say what he shall be done to — but, you'll see! Go, I'm looking at you!”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Catherine Linton to Joseph (Ch. III).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Hurt

“You're contending with a genius, D. J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 1

“Well, when all is said and done
Best within my narrow way,
May some angel of the sun
Muse memorial o'er my clay:
'Here was beauty all betrayed
From the freedom of her state;
From her human uses stayed
On an idle rhyme to wait.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Beauty , Angels , Way , Freedom

“True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Epipsychidion (1821)

Love , Truth , Error , Imagination

“When you live on Cold Mountain long enough the autumns pass quickly
When you live alone you have no worries
When you leave the doors open no one bothers you
The bubbling stream runs forever
In the cave a clay pot boils over a fire on the ground
A wandering breeze stirs the fragrant pines
When hungry I eat one simple meal
And lean against the rock in complete harmony”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Mountain , Autumn

“If you push it, it feels good; I don’t know what it is. It must have something to do with kinesthesia. I feel now that I am painting I'm not drawing anything, or even representing non-objective art. You know, you can represent abstract art, too, as well as heads figures, nudes. A lot of abstract artists are just representational painters, you know that. And a lot of figurative artists are very abstract. I don't feel as if I'm doing that. I feel more as if I'm shaping something with my hands. I feel as if I've always wanted to get to that state. Like a blind man in a dark room had some clay, what would he make? I end up with 2 or 3 forms on a canvas, but it gets very physical for me. I always thought I am a very spiritual man, not interested in paint, and now I discover myself to be very physical and very involved with matter. I want to be involved with how heavy things are, a balloon, how light things are, things levitating, pushing forms, make me feel as if my hand is pushing in a head, bulges out here and pushes there.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, pp. 73-75

Art , Feeling , Light , Drawing

“Punk: Because here is the truth about Las Vegas, here is the truth about the WWE is that it doesn't matter that if you're the best wrestler, it doesn't matter if you're the best talker, it doesn't matter if you're the best overall performer, it doesn't matter if you make the two clowns sitting to my left on commentary look like amateur hour. There is a glass ceiling and nobody is allowed to break it. That's the simple story of this place. The more popular you are, the more money you make. The more you people cheer for any given superstar, the more opportunities you're afforded. Why do you think a guy like John Cena, who has admittedly had the worst year of his career, gets title shot after title shot after title shot after title shot? Or why a lethal grappler, why a serious submission specialist like Daniel Bryan puts a smile on his face and settles himself, belittles himself with catchphrases. Or why a 400 pound monster, Brodus Clay, soils his hands by touching your filthy, ugly, little children to get in the ring so he can shuck and jive for you. Or why an invisible child, Little Jimmy, is better positioned on the flagship show Monday Night RAW than a workhorse like Tyson Kidd.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

WWE Raw

Money , Children , People , Truth

“Every individual, from the common mechanic, that works in wood or clay, to the prime minister that regulates with the dash of his pen the agriculture, the breeding of cattle, the mining, or the commerce of a nation, will perform his business the better, the better he understands the nature of things, and the more his understanding is enlightened.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book III, On Consumption, Chapter VI, Section II, p. 432

Understanding , Business , Nature

“Shortly before the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass offered a succinct summary of the dilemma confronting opponents of slavery like Lincoln, who worked within the political system rather than outside it. Abstractly, Douglass wrote, most northerners would agree that slavery was wrong. The challenge was to find a way of 'translating antislavery sentiment into antislavery action'. The constitution barred interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. For Lincoln, as for most Republicans, antislavery action meant not attacking slavery where it was but working to prevent slavery's westward expansion. Lincoln, however, did talk about a future without slavery. The aim of the Republican Party, he insisted, was to put the institution on the road to "ultimate extinction", a phrase he borrowed from Henry Clay. Ultimate extinction could take a long time. Lincoln once said that slavery might survive for another hundred years. But to the South, Lincoln seemed as dangerous as an abolitionist, because he was committed to the eventual end of slavery. This was why his election in 1860 led inexorably to secession and civil war.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

"Our Lincoln" http://www.ericfoner.com/articles/012609nation.html (26 January 2009), The Nation
2000s

War , Way , Time , Future

“The image of the city and the obliterated streets of Rotterdam haunted me. When I returned to Paris, I made a draft model for a statue in clay which attempted to express the combination of confusion and horror.... to stimulate emotion in the onlooker, to exude something which captivates the spectator, which opens up to them an unsuspected pathway in their own soul.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Quote of Zadkine from his 'Memoirs', 1967; as cited in 'Torso of the Destroyed City' http://www.zadkine.paris.fr/en/oeuvre/torso-destroyed-city, Musée Zadkine
Zadkine recounts the violence of the impressions which he felt then; the first draft for a monument to the 'Destroyed City', was broken in transport. A new version of a 'projected monument for a bombed city' was produced in 1947
1960 - 1968

Soul

“The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 17 (p. 401)

Life , People , Books , Beauty

“In Erlangen, for instance, in January 1946 he spoke of meeting a German Jew who had lost everything — parents, brothers, and sisters too. 'I could not help myself', said Niemöller, 'I had to tell him, "Dear brother, fellow man, Jew, before you say anything, I say to you: I acknowledge my guilt and beg you to forgive me and my people for this sin."' Niemöller's stance was by no means entirely welcome to the 1,200 students to whom he was preaching. They shouted and jeered as he preached that Germany must accept responsibility for the five or six million murdered Jews. Students in Marburg and Göttingen similarly heckled him. But Niemöller insisted that "We must openly declare that we are not innocent of the Nazi murders, of the murder of German communists, Poles, Jews, and the people in German-occupied countries. No doubt others made mistakes too, but the wave of crime started here and here it reached its highest peak. The guilt exists, there is no doubt about that — even if there were no other guilt than that of the six million clay urns containing the ashes of incinerated Jews from all over Europe. And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done."”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Sermons in Erlangen, Marburg, Göttingen and Frankfurt (January 1946), as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 177

People , World , Forgiveness , Parent

“You can’t explain the votes of places like Clay County as a response to disagreements about trade policy. The only way to make sense of what happened is to see the vote as an expression of, well, identity politics — some combination of white resentment at what voters see as favoritism toward nonwhites (even though it isn’t) and anger on the part of the less educated at liberal elites whom they imagine look down on them.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

The New York Times Columns, The Populism Perplex (November 25, 2016)

Education , Way , Imagination , Sense

“Bayle turned to watch the drifting mists along the shore and thought: In three days we have eaten with this Captain four times, talked with him about navigation, his three families, his collection of miniature clay idols, and have all decided he is a deep and impressive, if somewhat absentminded man. Yes, save I take this same ship returning, I may never see him again. Strange are the ways of travel.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 179)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Family , Way , Travel , Time

“Kernik had stumbled on an immutable truth, a truth older than the world. Priests claimed the gods made men, but this was not so. Men made the gods. Firstly, by forming them in clay, by chipping them from stone. Secondly, and more importantly, by believing in them, believing in them utterly.”

Tanith Lee book Volkhavaar

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 6 (p. 52)

Men , God , Truth , World

“A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Journal entry (26 July 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3

Light

“water from clay pipes is much more wholesome than that which is conducted through lead pipes, because lead is found to be harmful for the reason that white lead is derived from it, and this is said to be hurtful to the human system.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VIII, Chapter VI, Sec. 10

Water , Hurt

“For me, the nude body is like a raw material.. another artist might use oil or clay. I love the fact that, en masse, it can be turned into an infinite number of shapes or abstractions, while the setting I choose.. rural, urban, indoors or out.. is like a canvas.”

Spencer Tunick (1967) American photographer

Over 1,700 men and women strip naked in square in Germany.. and not a sun lounger in sight, 2012

Love

“The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 2, p. 66

Past , Future

“Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear;
They breathe a soul to animate thy clay.
Bright Rapture calls, and soaring, as she sings,
Waves in the eye of Heav'n her many-colour'd wings.”

Thomas Gray The Bard

III. 2. lines 121-124
The Bard (1757)

Soul , Singing , Animals

“Today I painted my first plain air portrait at the clay pit, a little blond and blue-eyed girl. The way the little thing stood in the yellow sand was simply beautiful – a bright and shimmering thing to see. It made my heart leap. Painting people is indeed more beautiful than painting a landscape. I suppose you can notice that I am dead-tired, after this long day of hard work, cant you? But inside I am so peaceful and happy..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

in a letter to her mother, from Worpswede, August 1897; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals by Paula Modersohn-Becker, eds. Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey - Northwestern University Press, 1998, p. 79
1897

People , Peace , Beauty , Way

“Clay masonry, like concrete, is a "plastic" material that permits the pouring in situ of large monoliths of any shape or form, with certain limitations and by using special methods. Its economical possibilities when used in walls of popular housing, its excellent heat and sound insulation, as well as its aesthetic possibilities, should not be underestimated. Its resistance and durability can be substantially improved by using modern techniques and methods, for example, admixture of small amounts of Portland cement in accordance with granulometric investigation, petrographic composition, and rheological behaviour of all constituents.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Housing

“If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the seventh book, "The Book of Youth"
The Pillow Book

Life , Painting

“I now know that sculpture is made from rough externals by rough characters or men who have passed through all polish and are back to the rough again.
The mystic modeling clay in only Ohio mud, the tools are at hand in garages and factories. Casting can be achieved in almost every town.”

David Smith (1906–1965) American visual artist (1906-1965)

1950s, Tradition and Identity' (1959)

Men

“There are three basic theories about this coming Final Empire, or The New World Order.
1. It will be a revival of the Roman Empire, where ten European countries try to band together, maybe like the European Common Market.
2. It will be an attempted union of ten world regions, like a North American Region, Asia-Pacific Region, etc.
3. It will be an alliance of 10 Muslim countries that surround (and hate) Israel and have for 4,000-years!
My study has led me to believe this final 10 nation empire will be 10 Muslim nations since they all hate each other and fight all the time just as God said they would in Genesis 16:12. They will never really “bond,” just as iron and clay will not bond with each other. Since this kingdom will have areas where enforcement of their rules and policies (like maybe taking a mark to buy and sell (Revelation 13-14)?) will be “weak” or “broken,” I have long prayed for God to put me some place where it is broken!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 92-93

God , Hate , World , Study

“They killed her with their chassepot,
With their machine guns,
And rolled her with its flag
In the clay.
And the mud of the fat hangmen
thought they had prevailed.
And with all that, Nicolas,
The Commune is not dead.”

Eugène Edine Pottier (1816–1887) French politician

On l'a tuée à coups de chassepot
A coups de mitrailleuse,
Et roulée avec son drapeau
Dans la terre argileuse.
Et la tourbe des bourreaux gras
Se croyait la plus forte.
Tout ça n'empêche pas, Nicolas
Qu'la Commune n'est pas morte.
Elle n'est pas morte ! (1886).

Communication , Dead

“I think its time to get motivated folks. I don't know what you're doing, but it's time to get really moving. We are rapidly running out of time. What do we do? Number one, you need to realize that God is in control. Don't get nervous, get busy, but don't get nervous. For he's the potter, we're the clay. Do what he says, simple. We should be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Be careful for nothing, full of care. Don't get nervous, just get busy. We should pray for those in authority. If you were praying for your senators, you would know their names, wouldn't you? We're God's children. It's our job to obey him. Preach the Gospel. We're suppose to be the salt of the earth. Salt does a lot of interesting things. Salt preserves; you should be a preserving force in your community. Salt irritates. If nobody is irritated with you, you aren't a good Christian.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

God , Children , Communication , Motivation

“[T]hey wanted… another Joe Louis. A white man's black man… Didn't these idiots realize that Cassius Clay was the name of a slave owner? … Had I been black and my name Cassius Clay, I damned well would have changed it!”

Howard Cosell (1918–1995) American sportscaster

Cosell.

Change

“Through honeycombs of stone would now be wandering the passions in their clay. There would be tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and disenchantment.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 69 “Mr Rottcodd Again” (p. 396)

Death , Dreams , Birth , Tear

“The slavery debate has been really a death-struggle from that moment. Mr. Clay thought not. Mr. Clay was a shrewd politician, but the difference between him and Calhoun was the difference between principle and expediency. Calhoun's sharp, incisive genius has engraved his name, narrow but deep, upon our annals. The fluent and facile talents of Clay in a bold, large hand wrote his name in honey upon many pages. But time is already licking it away. Henry Clay was our great compromiser. That was known, and that was the reason why Mr. Buchanan's story of a bargain with J. Q. Adams always clung to Mr. Clay. He had compromised political policies so long that he had forgotten there is such a thing as political principle, which is simply a name for the moral instincts applied to government. He did not see that when Mr. Calhoun said he should return to the Constitution he took the question with him, and shifted the battle-ground from the low, poisonous marsh of compromise, where the soldiers never know whether they are standing on land or water, to the clear, hard height of principle. Mr. Clay had his omnibus at the door to roll us out of the mire. The Whig party was all right and ready to jump in. The Democratic party was all right. The great slavery question was going to be settled forever. The bushel-basket of national peace and plenty and prosperity was to be heaped up and run over. Mr. Pierce came all the way from the granite hills of New Hampshire, where people are supposed to tell the truth, to an- nounce to a happy country that it was at peace — that its bushel-basket was never so overflowingly full before. And then what? Then the bottom fell out. Then the gentlemen in the national rope -walk at Washington found they had been busily twining a rope of sand to hold the country together. They had been trying to compromise the principles of human justice, not the percentage of a tariff; the instincts of human nature and consequently of all permanent government, and the conscience of the country saw it. Compromises are the sheet-anchor of the Union — are they? As the English said of the battle of Bunker Hill, that two such victories would ruin their army, so two such sheet- anchors as the Compromise of 1850 would drag the Union down out of sight forever.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Death , People , Truth , Peace

“Vile man, begot of clay, and born of dust.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Canto IV, stanza 10 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

“It is no mystery that clay cook pots perform as they do or that clay ovens are considered healthy devices for us to use. In prehistoric times, baking ovens were built of clay and sand. Later these stoves were placed inside shelters where they could deliver some of their accumulated heat to the household…”

Ken Kern American writer

p, 125
Ken Kern's Masonry Stove (1983)

Time , Cooking

“Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 4 ("Reveille"), st. 6.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Sleep , Time

“Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the entrance. The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a ballad.”

Anton Chekhov book The Black Monk

The Black Monk (1894)

Water , Housing , Cry

“I saw it," said James. "I saw it when he made the sparrows out of clay on the Sabbath. The teacher told him he shouldn’t do such things on the Sabbath. Jesus looked at the birds and they turned into real birds. They flew away. You saw it too. He killed Eleazer, Mother, I saw it.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Christ The Lord: Out Of Egypt (2005)

Bird , Teachers

“To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation

Wisdom , Color , Way , Future

“Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were't not a Shame — were't not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Soul

“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 (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

The Italian Itinerant.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

World , Thinking

“January, 14th, 1835: We came to anchor in the spacious bay of Santa Barbara. There was only one vessel in the port. Beside the vessel, there was no object to break the surface of the bay… directly opposite the anchoring ground, lie the mission and town of Santa Barbara, on a low plain, but little above the level of the sea, covered with grass, though entirely without trees, and surrounded on three sides by an amphitheater of mountains, which slant off to the distance of fifteen or twenty miles. The mission stands a little back of the town, and is a large building, or rather a collection of buildings, in the center of which is a high tower, with a belfry of five bells. The whole, being plastered, makes quite a show at a distance, and is the mark by which vessels come to anchor. The town lies a little nearer to the beach — about half a mile from it — and is composed of one-story houses built of sun-baked clay, or adobe, some of them whitewashed, with red tiles on the roof. I should judge that there was about a hundred of them… The town is finely situated, with a bay in front, and an amphitheater of hills behind.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

Lie , Mountain , Tree , Grass

“Among other things, we are supposed to spot the toes of clay splaying out from under the pearl-gray spats, or the cloven hoof encased in the jackboot, before anyone else. Cynicism also is the touchstone of a reporter's alchemy through which he hopes to discover that nonexistent load called "objectivity." For as a set of philosophers, the only true objective reporter is the dead one.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

This I Believe (1951)

Hope , Dead

“Llonio said life was a net for luck; to Hevydd the Smith life was a forge; and to Dwyvach the Weaver-Woman a loom. They spoke truly, for it is all of these. But you,” Taran said, his eyes meeting the potter’s, “you have shown me life is one thing more. It is clay to be shaped, as raw clay on a potter’s wheel.”

Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydain

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book IV: Taran Wanderer (1967), Chapter 21

Life

“With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out of which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plank roads to the street, until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable shops, tailors’, delicatessens. (pp. 23-24)”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Manhattan Transfer (1925)

Flowers , Grass , Past , Housing

“[Pao-yu] says the strangest things for a mere child—for instance, that girls are made of water while men are made of clay and that's why he feels purified and invigorated in the presence of the one and contaminated and oppressed when in the presence of the other.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 22

Men , Feeling , Girl , Water

“One can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.”

Bernard Malamud book Dubin's Lives

Dubin's Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) p. 27

Life , Time

“To get wealth and security by guile
Is like one who pours water into a pot of unbaked clay.”

Thiruvalluvar book Tirukkuṛaḷ

Verse LXVI.10
Tirukkural

Water , Wealth

“All Marie was earth before it became marle, it is a kinde of clay ground, and chalke it selfe was marle before it became chalke. And that which is more, that which is yet chalke within the Matrix of the earth, wil in time harden into a white stone, And last of all, wheresoever there bee any stones that be subiect to calcination, they were first marle before they were stones, for otherwise by their calcination they could not possibly amend any barren grounds … Also chalke and lime, after the frostes have taken them, whereby they crumble into powder, do become good marle, and serve in stead thereof.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

Source: Diverse new Sorts of Soylenot yet brought into any publique Use, 1594, p. 23-24; Cited in: Malcolm Thick (1994)

Bee , Time

“The planted seed consigned to common earth,
Disdains to moulder with the baser clay;
But rises up to meet the light of day,
Spreads all its leaves, and flowers, and tendrils forth;
And, bathed and ripened in the genial ray,
Pours out its perfume on the wandering gales,
Till in that fragrant breath its life exhales.”

Anne Lynch Botta (1815–1891) writer, poet, socialite

Aspiration

Life , Flowers , Light

“For Beethoven, music was still shape, realized and inflected by instrumental sonority: other realizations may be as absurd as arrangements of the Hammerklavier, for example, always are, but the musical conception takes precedence over its realization in sound. The sonority serves the music. For Schumann, however, as for Chopin and Liszt, the conception was worked out directly within the sonority as a sculptor works directly in clay or marble. The instrumental sound is shaped into music.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Music

“I like the notion of working the program, like an artist works a lump of clay. An artist wants to make a sculpture, but before she makes the sculpture, she just massages the clay. She starts towards making the sculpture, and sees what the clay wants to do. And the more she handles the clay, the more the clay tends to do what she wants. It becomes compliant to her will.
A development team works on a piece of code over several months. Initially, they make a piece of code, and it's a little stiff. It's small, but it's still stiff. Then they move the code, and it gets a little easier to move.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Working the Program

“I have hardly touched the clay and I am made of it.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Casi no he tocado el barro y soy de barro.
Voces (1943)

“It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to everything about astronomy except studying it.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 22

Study

“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 (1864–1901) Jain scholar who represented Jainism at the first World Parliament of Religions in 1893

Christian Missions: A Triangular Debate, Before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York (1895)

Tear

“Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.
But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 15 (p. 140)

Life , Birth , Light , Animals

“In time the Rockies may crumble,
Gibraltar may tumble,
They're only made of clay,
But our love is here to stay.”

Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) American lyricist

"Our Love Is Here to Stay", The Goldwyn Follies (1938).

Love , Time

“Pride misers with enjoyment, when we have
Delight in things that are but of the mind:
But half humility when we partake
Pleasures that are half wants, the spirit pines
And struggles in its fetters, and disdains
The low base clay to which it is allied.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)

Pleasure

“If we are only as the potter's clay
Made to be fashioned as the artist wills,
And broken into shards if we offend
The eye of Him who made us, it is well.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Rights; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Fashion

“And shall they rise, all these? Will there be a trumpet blast so shrill that none of them may refuse to hear it, and the soul, re-entering its shrine of eminent or common clay, pass upward to the judgment? "Many and mighty, but all hushed," shall they submit with us to the judgment of the last assize? And in that world is it true that gold is not the currency, and that rank is not hereditary, and that there is only one name that is honored? Then, if this is the end of all men, let the living lay it to heart. Solemn and thoughtful, let us search for an assured refuge; childlike and earnest, let us conf1de in the one accepted Name; let us realize the tender and infinite nearness of God our Father, through Jesus our Surety and our Friend.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 519.

Men , God , World , Soul

“We lived one year in a suburb so new it was still being built in fields of red clay: a neat grid of streets named after songbirds was being dropped like a lattice of dough over a pie. Up and down Robin and Tanager and Bluebird I raced my bike; in a storm I pedaled so fast I hoped to catch up with the wind-driven rain. As I sped into the riddling wet warmth I shook my right hand according to a magical formula of my own. The universe, signaled by its master, groaned, revolved, released a flash of lightning. At last the imagination, like a mold on an orange, was covering the globe of my mind.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Three (p. 81).

Hope , Imagination , Universe

“In comparing civilized man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all, the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean furnaces—of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 131-132

World , Travel , Mountain , Animals

“My friends are not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them!… If there were two Henry Clays, one of them would make the other President of the United States!… It is a diabolical intrigue, I know now, which has betrayed me. I am the most unfortunate man in the history of parties: always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for a nomination when I, or any one, would be sure of an election.”

Henry Clay (1777–1852) American politician from Kentucky

Upon hearing (in December 1839) that he had been rejected in favor of William Henry Harrison as the Whig Party nominee for President in the election of 1840.
Quoted by Henry A. Wise, who claimed to have heard it firsthand, in Seven Decades of the Union (1872), ch. VI.

History

“White magic is supposedly utilized only for good or unselfish purposes, and black magic, we are told, is used only for selfish or "evil" reasons. Satanism draws no such dividing line. Magic is magic, be it used to help or hinder. The Satanist, being the magician, should have the ability to decide what is just, and then apply the powers of magic to attain his goals. Nature, in her ineffable wisdom, wastes nothing. Seemingly useless but parasitic or destructive persons should be used like clay pigeons: for target practice.”

Anton LaVey book The Satanic Bible

The Satanic Bible (1969)

Wisdom , Nature , Evil , Help

“Its decadence, satiety, and languor [of Roman civilization] interested me. And I kept looking and returning to their wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and their elegant plasticity. I admired the way they used their geology in their art — the sense of mineral, clay. rock, marble, and stone.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

from his letter to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. 6 November, 1955; as cited in the text of 'The Baziotes Memorial Exhibition' and its accompanying catalogue by Lawrence Alloway; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1965, p. 11
1950s

Art , Way , Sense , Painting