# Clay

Clay is a naturally occurring material composed primarily of fine-grained minerals, which show plasticity through a variable range of water content, and which can be hardened when dried and/or fired.

## Quotes

* Do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
** Frédéric Bastiat,The Law (1850)
* 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, Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems: Interviews by Roberto Alifano (1984)
* Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.
** Robert Browning, Dramatis Personae (1864), "Rabbi Ben Ezra"
* The heart -- which may be broken: happy they! Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould, The precious porcelain of human clay, Break with the first fall.
** Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IV (1821)
* How shall we celebrate the day, When God appeared in mortal clay, The mark of worldly scorn.
** Thomas Chatterton, "A Hymn for Christmas Day"
* If we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything.
** G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (1901),"A Defence of Baby-Worship"
* Clay is embedded in our subconscious. It has been there for at least 50,000 years.
** Art Clokey, quoted by Mike Antonucci (Knight Ridder), "Gumby's creator formed a spirit in clay", The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 1 January 1998, p. 6E
* A vase of unbaked clay, when broken, may be remoulded, but not a baked one.
** Leonardo da Vinci,The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, tr. Jean Paul Richter, XX
* These look like the workmanship of heaven; This is the porcelain clay of human kind, And therefore cast into these noble moulds.
** John Dryden,Don Sebastian (1690), Act I, scene i
* This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image.
** James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), "The Creation"
* 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, The Rubaiyat (1120), XLIV
* Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?
** Isaiah 45:9 (KJV)
* Who are they who speak evil of the clay? The very stars are made of clay like mine!
** Jack London,letter to Charles Warren Stoddard (11 August 1905)
* In man, creator and created are united; in man in the material, the fragment, the surplus, the clay, the mud, the foolishness, the chaos; but in man also is the creator, the sculptor, the wielder of the hammer, the beholder of divinity, the seventh day.
** Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 225
* 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, Terre des Hommes (1939)
* Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
** William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene i
* If they find some stain or blemish in a name of note, not grieving that their greatest are so small, inflate themselves with some insane delight, and judge all nature from her feet of clay.
** Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King (1859–1885), "Merlin and Vivien"
* What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?
** Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), ch. 17: "Spring"
* A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay.”
** Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1.5
* To get wealth and security by guile Is like one who pours water into a pot of unbaked clay.
** Tiruvalluvar, Tirukkural, 66:10

## See also

* Clay tablet
* Mud
* Pottery