Clay Art Quotes & Sayings

If someone took the finest marble and knew how to shape it artfully: Prometheus' material was lowly clay, but his statues walked. — Franz Grillparzer

How shall I begin to deplore the deeds of my miserable life? What beginning shall I make, O Christ, to this lament? But since Thou art compassionate, grant me remission of my trespasses." "Like as the potter gives life to his clay, Thou hast bestowed upon me Flesh and bones, breath and life; Today, O my Creator, my Redeemer and My Judge, Receive me a penitent ... " "I have lost my first made beauty and dignity, And now I lie naked and covered with shame ... — Alexander Schmemann

In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art from, she became dangerous. — Toni Morrison

Thou art moist and soft clay; thou must instantly be shaped by the glowing wheel.
[Lat., Udum et molle lutum es: nunc, nunc properandus et acri
Fingendus sine fine rota.] — Aulus Persius Flaccus

Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the Potter and I am the clay. — Chaim Potok

She dug into one of the boxes, finding clay angels she'd made in art class when she was seven years old. She found plastic swans on strings and red crystal cardinals. She found a blue-and-white rocking horse covered in glitter. She found a porcelain Santa Claus. She found that she couldn't figure out where the hell time had gone. — Rebecca McNutt

When they gaze in confusion
at the broken, odd shaped, colorful
shards of glass that we are,

let them know

that we too belong here, here
in this gallery. Masterpieces,
we are not

here by accident

but have been carefully assembled
and put together and are held together
in this ceramic panel - our bodies of clay -
by good intentions.

We too are works of art. — Ayokunle Falomo

Love is the only bow of life's dark cloud. It is the Morning and Evening Star. It shines upon the cradle of the babe, and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb. It is the Mother of Art, inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home, kinder of every fire on every hearth, it was the first dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to joy, and makes right royal kings of common clay ... — Robert Green Ingersoll

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

I never want to produce anything that a family could not enjoy together. I never want to create art that would embarrass my own children later. — Clay Aiken

I grew up watching my father make plates that featured penises as centerpieces. Pink, proud, and stiff, encircled by cerulean Greek key, Dad's creations made me feel scared and small. I saw a private part of the man I could not measure up to. At six years old, I lived in a world shaded by his ceramic glazes. There was love and color, but anger, too, in the way he kneaded his clay, palms pounding the rich, wet earth into shapes of his choosing. — Royal Young

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

And human love needs human meriting:
How has thou merited-
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me? — Francis G. Thompson

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

I don't want to think too much about how I'm carving and what I'm carving - you are just carving away the excess clay and there's a piece underneath there. And it's kind of like getting out of the way. Maybe that's what the commonality is: It's getting out of the way so that the art can speak. — Erykah Badu

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so. — Jorge Luis Borges

Yes, you have been molding your ability to perform Jiu Jitsu for all these years, but you have been more importantly molding who you are as a person. Jiu Jitsu is the sculptor, and you are the clay. It is with this art that we strive and reach for our highest ideals not as athletes, but as people. — Chris Matakas

Failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements ... Any one of the old four - earth, air, fire, water - can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter - months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln. — A.S. Byatt

I just love the whole art form of acting, of being in front of a camera and playing different things. Not that I would ever say I'm the greatest actor in the world, but I am capable of playing different kinds of roles that emotionally I could get into. — Andrew Dice Clay

You cannot look into a cradle and read the secret message traced by a divine hand and wrapped up in that bit of clay, and more than you can see the North Star in the magnetic needle. God has loaded the needle of that young life so it will point to the star which presides over poetry, art, law, medicine, or whatever your own pet calling is, until you have wasted years precious life, yet, when once free, the needle flies back to its own star. — Orison Swett Marden

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. — Jorge Luis Borges

I heard some famous people had an anniversary, five long years together, it was Hollywood history. Now my grandma and grandpa never made no printed page, but they took the love of 57 years right to the grave. — Clay Walker

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

Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the industrialist and prodigious art collector. It is said that he liked to wander through his gallery at night in quiet contemplation. — Anonymous

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art
the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases
beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden. — Anne Rice

I was selling a piece of my art on eBay from The Escapist, which was an adaptation of The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and the person who bought it was Alan Heinberg, one of the executive producers of the show and was a huge fan of my work and asked if I'd be interested in maybe being the ghost artist for Seth. It clicked and I could relate to Seth's plight on the show. It became really easy to fill in his shoes, and people really grabbed onto it; they really dug that sort of very minor sub-plot in the show. — Eric Wight

To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that 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 one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors. — Albert Camus

Helen's era was quite different from what most people think of when they hear the words ancient Greece. The Parthenon, the graceful statues, the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, all came nearly a thousand years after Helen's time, during the classical era. In the Bronze Age, no one yet knew how to make brittle iron flexible enough to use for tools and weapons. Art, especially sculpture of the human form, was stiffer and more stylized. Few people could read or write. Instead of signing important papers, you would use a stone seal to leave an impression on clay tablets. The design on the seal would be as unique as a signature. There was a kind of writing in Bronze Age Greece, but it was mostly used to keep track of financial matters, such as royal tax records. Messages, poems, songs, and stories were not written down but were memorized and passed along by word of mouth. — Esther M. Friesner

Cease, stranger, cease those witching notes,
The art of syren choirs;
Hush the seductive voice that floats
Across the trembling wires.
Music's ethereal power was given
Not to dissolve our clay,
But draw Promethean beams from heaven
To purge the dross away. — John Henry Newman

Shadow! or Spirit!
Whatever thou art,
Which still doth inherit
The whole or a part
Of the form of thy birth,
Of the mould of thy clay,
Which returned to the earth,
Re-appear to the day! — George Gordon Byron

Making art is dealing with people on your own terms. The ideal way of using people is using them like clay, but that being out of the question, except for lunatics and leaders, art is a good alternative. — Lucas Samaras

He expected pages and pages of bright pictures of pancakes of every variety shown in plain stacks, or built into castles or bridges or igloos, or shaped like airplanes or rowboats or fire engines. And pitchers of syrup to choose from
partridge berry syrup, thimbleberry syrup, huckleberry syrup, bosenberry syrup, and raspberry syrup. Then there would be cheese plates and cheeses a la carte. Creamy cheeses, crumbly cheeses, and peculiar little cheeses in peculiar little clay pots. — Michael Hoeye

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand. — Janet Fitch

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. JL Borges — Jan Karon

I really do think that art can save you in some sense. It's the last meaning, unless you're religious-and I'm not religious. It's the only secular vehicle for transcendence we have. It's an immediate self-validating experience. It lifts you beyond your mortal clay. — Sam Savage

Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Oh teach the mind t' aetherial heights to rise,
And view familiar, in its native skies,
Thy source of good; thy splendor to descry,
And on thy self, undazled, fix her eye.
Oh quicken this dull mass of mortal clay;
Shine through the soul, and drive its clouds away!
For thou art Light. In thee the righteous find
Calm rest, and soft serenity of mind;
Thee they regard alone; to thee they tend;
At once our great original and end,
At once our means, our end, our guide, our way,
Our utmost bound, and our eternal stay! — Boethius