"Time is clay. Go make something."
Clay quotes
Clay
168 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside clay — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Clay quotes (page 1 of 9)
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"It is better to live as a broken piece of jade, than to live as a useless clay."
"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."
"In building a statue, a sculptor doesn't keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the nonessentials until the truth of his creation is revealed without obstruction."
"In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts."
"For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe."
"You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love."
"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 asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."
"Don't see yourself as a body of clay; See yourself as a mirror reflecting the divine beauty."
"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."
"I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath."
"You cannot expect stone to be as pliable as clay."
"It's exciting to have a role in anything that's Claymation, just because you're always intrigued by what a clay wizard version of yourself would be."
"The living thing is not the clay molded by the potter, nor the harp played upon by the musician. It is the clay modeling itself."
"[The internet] ought to be like clay, rather than a sculpture that you observe from a distance."
"What an antithetical mind! - tenderness, roughness - delicacy, coarseness - sentiment, sensuality - soaring and groveling, dirt and deity - all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!"
"Clay is moulded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. . . . Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not."
"The same sun that melts the butter hardens the clay."
"I like doing clay work. It's different from drawing on a page because you have something to mold into different shapes. It's quite visual, it's a thing you can hold and feel, and that makes it different from drawing."
"A vessel is formed from a lump of clay with care, however, it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful."
"Mold clay into a bowl. The empty space makes it useful."