The Clay Marble 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

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

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals. — Vincent Van Gogh

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

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

So says the most ancient book of the Earth; thus it is written on its leaves of marble, lime, sand, slate, and clay: ... that our Earth has fashioned itself, from its chaos of substances and powers, through the animating warmth of the creative spirit, to a peculiar and original whole, by a series of preparatory revolutions, till at last the crown of its creation, the exquisite and tender creature man, was enabled to appear. — Johann Gottfried Herder

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on. — Jonathan Safran Foer

...carved marble figures in strata that "suggests the characters were made by intelligent humans from the distant past,"
a section of gold thread found in strata between 320 and 360 million years old,
a report in a nineteenth-century edition of Scientific American recording the discovery of a metallic vase in strata 600 million years old,
a chalk ball in France in strata 45-55 million years old,
a machined coin with undecipherable writing at least 200,000 years old, discovered in Illinois,
a clay figurine discovered in Idaho that is atleast two million years old.
The list of suppressed and conveniently forgotten discoveries goes on and on, — Joseph P. Farrell

If I were but mere dust and ashes I might speak unto the Lord, for the Lord's hand made me of this dust, and the Lord's hand shall re-collect these ashes; the Lord's hand was the wheel upon which this vessel of clay was framed, and the Lord's hand is the urn in which these ashes shall be preserved. I am the dust and the ashes of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious? But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul. And being so, the breath of God, I may breathe back these pious expostulations to my God: — John Donne