Molding Clay Quotes

People don't change because you want them to. They aren't clay, ready to be molded.

My mind is like clay, but thank goodness God knows how to mold it!

Oh her deathbed, when her hands could no longer weave or paint or mold clay, she'd told stories and filled them with the colors she loved.

God can take what Satan meant for shame and use it for His glory. Just when we think we've messed up so badly that our lives are nothing but heaps of ashes, God pours His living water over us and mixes the ashes into clay. He then takes this clay and molds it into a vessel of beauty. After He fills us with His overflowing love, He can use us to pour His love into the hurting lives of others.

But history is so often molded from tainted clay by those who remain.

Where is an intimate friend who’ll hear the secret from me straight out– of what human beings have been from the moment they began? They are born of toil and molded from the clay of sorrow. They wander the world for a time, then set off.

You came to us a lump of clay, and we molded you into an instrument of Death.

The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows. Now warm, now chill, next joyous, then despairing, the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him, no matter how stable, even loving. No ties, no binding chains, save those he forges for himself. Or so he thinks. But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it. Therefore create. Act God. Fashion men and women as Prometheus fashioned them from clay, and, by doing this, work out the unconscious strife within and be reconciled. While in others, imbued with a desire to mold, to instruct, to spread a message that will inspire the reader and so change his world, though the motive may be humane and even noble--many great works have done just this--the source is the same dissatisfaction, a yearning to escape.

The clay of White Fang had been molded until he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.

He tried. He really did. For a good ninety seconds he molded the clay as best he could. His final effort came out resembling a pear.

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their distances from men.

Who should we be trying to make the most proud? Our family? Our friends? Our teachers or bosses? What about the one who molded us out of the earth itself, who formed us like clay, and instilled within us the very breath of life that shaped the universe?

Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. Swell with pride and gratitude, for you are tiny and given much. You are as spoken by God as the stars.

Soul. The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I'd pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person--a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person's experiences--a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we've ever known.

What you repeatedly do carries the clay to mold you into who you eventually become. Don’t despise any tiny minute of the day; each counts so much!

I hope your molding skills are up to date. Because really, some things, when broken, are impossible to repair, never mind how much clay you put on it.

We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.

Carve out the time. Notice I do not say find the time. That is an absurd and dangerous phrase. Time is never lying around waiting for us to find her. She is elusive. She wants you to sculpt her like clay, to mold her into exactly the form you desire your days to take. If you refuse to do that, if you spend your mornings worrying and your afternoons catering to others, always hoping there will be a few minutes left for you, time will play you like a sucker, making you run harder and faster with each passing week. Time wants you to realize that she is the most precious and irreducible fact in your live. Make her into what you will

Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.

Your life is a piece of clay; don't let anyone else mold it for you.

Thought - or suggestion - is able to mold the human body as a sculptor chisels his clay.

For as from the same piece of clay a potter may fashion either a pot or a tile, so the Devil may shape a witch into a wolf or a cat or even a goat, without subtracting from her and without adding to her at all. For this occurs just as clay is first molded into one, then shaped into another form, for the Devil is a potter and his witches are but clay.

Raindrops fall from clouds of gray. The fragile flowers grow. Teardrops seem all I can say. They speak of endless woe. Your fingers wipe my grief away. A seed of love you sow. A hardened heart reverts to clay. You mold my love just so.

Mold clay into a bowl. The empty space makes it useful.

Divinity retains the appearance of insight, when in reality it celebrates ignorance. Its tenets are so much clay, and when the clay sets, it becomes dogma.

I think you’re right. Your feelings for people do change with time. You might need someone for one reason, and then when that reason is obsolete, you might not need that person anymore. People come in and out of your life all the time. They shape and mold you like clay, and then the water washes away the edges.

Fate, they say, fate- the clay that molds the events of your life, and it was the same fate that had thrown the stone of her heart on the building of his expectations. But then wasn't it his fault that he had constructed the building of glass? Hadn't he failed to cement the bricks of his love with trust and colour them with security? There was no insurance for broken hearts, no ointment for wounded souls and there would never be one, he knew.

The character you seem to have been born with is not necessarily who you are; beyond the characteristics you have inherited, your parents, your friends, and your peers have helped to shape your personality. The Promethean task of the powerful is to take control of the process, to stop allowing others that ability to limit and mold them. Remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist — an artist creating yourself.

Song" Observe the cautious toadstools still on the lawn today though they grow over-evening; sun shrinks them away. Pale and proper and rootless, they righteously extort their living from the living. I have been their sort. See by our blocked foundation the cold, archaic clay, stiff and clinging and sterile as children mold at play or as the Lord God fashioned before He breathed it breath. The earth we dig and carry for flowers, is strong in death. Woman, we are the rich soil, friable and humble, where all our murders rot, where our old deaths crumble and fortify my reach far from you, wide and free, though I have set my root in you and am your tree.

We can change, evolve, and trans­form our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.

Christianity is not clay in the hands of the world-spirit to be molded by it, but is itself to be the moulder of public sentiment and everything else.

Life is the clay from which dreams are molded.

Clay is molded 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.

We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits,

As soon as Nicholas was born, my mother swore she'd rather see her daughters become Jehovah's Witnesses or pole dancers before she saw her first grandchild in daycare when my sister went back to work. I don't think it was originally the idea of daycare that didn't sit well with her but the fact that there, in a bassinet, was a fresh slate, a lump of clay that could be worked on and molded into the perfect child who had eluded her the first time around with her own daughters.

His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. His suit coat fluttered behind him, and his arms swung easily as he walked.

A decent guy doesn’t just get born and grow up to be Mr. Perfect.  They need to be created by a woman.  They’re like a dumb blank lump of clay and you have to mold them into what you want them to be, while erasing everything their mothers ever taught them and all the horrible internet porn they’ve watched growing up.

Maybe something happens to a man at that age when life had always worked out the way he had wanted it, or made it. When he had been able to take it like a block of clay and mold it in the way he saw fit, or grab it like a sapling and force it to bend to his will. When he had been life's master, and not the other way around.

The neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondrial fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him on whom he is dependent become his therapeutic work project; he takes out his subjective problems on them. But people are not clay to be molded; they have needs and counter-wills of their own. The neurotic's frustration as a failed artist can't be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or "bad" one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this "badness" by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his "creative" work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he also satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.

Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?

My brothers and sisters, you also must believe that your lives are clay in the hands of a wonderful Sculptor. He never makes mistakes. If at times He is hard on you, it is because He sometimes has what we could call negative successes. He loses a pawn in order to win the chess game. He loses a battle in order to win a war. He causes his Son to endure suffering in order to save a world. Just trust. Don’t live on another’s messages, but discover the message for which He is molding you.

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.

I molded my body in clay on the potter’s wheel. I carved my own heart out of carnelian and gave to my family my red, red love.

The future was clay, to be molded day by day, but the past was bedrock, immutable.

I’ve never felt anything so fucking incredible in my life. She molds to my cock like wet clay.

Anoint me with "Fresh Oil" O God! Mold me and make me...totally for Your use! You are the potter, I am the clay. Amen

man is not molded from clay . . . he is pounded like hot iron on an anvil.

Children are also given to us to help us personally mature as parents. They teach us how to stop being so selfish and to give sacrificially. They pull us out of our comfort zones and stretch our abilities. They repeat our words and test our integrity. They expose our pride and deepen our humility. They help us learn to love more willingly. They enter this world as if to say, “Here I am, a mirror to reveal you, ready clay for you to mold. I am given to bear your name and reflect your likeness. I am more valuable than anything you own, and I could become your greatest investment in the world.

O fleeting joys of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes! Did I request thee, maker, from my clay to mold me man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me, or here place in this delicious garden? As my will concurred not to my being, it were but right and equal to reduce me to my dust, desirous to resign, and render back all I received, unable to perform thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold the good I sought not.

People choose because there are choices. And because they themselves created those choices. People created evil, molded the clay with their own hands. And as they created evil they acknowledged its opposite as good.

Lament No permanence is ours; we are a wave That flows to fit whatever form it finds: Through day or night, cathedral or the cave We pass forever, craving form that binds. Mold after mold we fill and never rest, We find no home where joy or grief runs deep. We move, we are the everlasting guest. No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap. What God would make of us remains unknown: He plays; we are the clay to his desire. Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan; He kneads, but never gives us to the fire. To stiffen to stone, to persevere! We long forever for the right to stay. But all that ever stays with us is fear, And we shall never rest upon our way.

Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?

When God wants to drill a man, And thrill a man, And skill a man, When God wants to mold a man To play the noblest part; When He yearns with all His heart To create so great and bold a man That all the world shall be amazed, Watch His methods, watch His ways! How He ruthlessly perfects Whom He royally elects! How He hammers him and hurts him, And with mighty blows converts him Into trial shapes of clay which Only God understands; While his tortured heart is crying And he lifts beseeching hands! How He bends but never breaks When his good He undertakes; How He uses whom He chooses, And with every purpose fuses him; But every act induces him To try His splendor out— God knows what He’s about. SELECTED Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character. GOETHE

A decent guy doesn't just get born and grow up to be Mr. Perfect. They need to be created by a woman. They're like a dumb blank lump of clay and you have to mold them into what you want them to be, while erasing all the horrible internet porn they've watched growing up" -- LEA

We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.

His bowels, far greater alchemist than he had ever been, regularly performed the transmutation of corpses, those of beasts and of plants, into living matter, separating the useful from the dross without help from him. Ignis inferioris Naturae: those spirals of brown mud, precisely coiled and still steaming from the decocting process which they have undergone in their mold, this ammoniac and nitric fluid passed into a clay pot, were the visible and fetid proof of work completed in laboratories where we do not intervene. It seemed to Zeno that the disgust of fastidious persons at this refuse, and the obscene laughter of the ignorant, were due less to the fact that these objects offend our senses than to our horror in the presence of the mysterious and ineluctable routines of our bodies.

Oh, God, You have given me a vacant soul, an untaught conscience, a life of clay. Put Your big hands around mine and guide my hands as a teacher guides the childish fingers that hold their first crayon, so that everytime I make a mark on this life, it will be Your mark. When my hands mold this clay, may the impressions be, in reality, made by the movement of Your hands and directed by Your perfect thoughts.

Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. Swell with pride and gratitude, for you are tiny and given much. You are as spoken by God as the stars. You stand in history with stories stretching out both behind and before. We

In our patakis, our folk myths, we believe that we come to the world with a destiny we picked for ourselves in Arun. Obatala creates the human body, but you have to get your head from the potter who molds them out of clay in his warehouse. On a good day he makes beautiful heads, but sometimes he gets drunk and makes a bad head. It’s a divine defect. There’s no way to tell from the outside, but once you’ve chosen your head, you have to live your destiny.

My entire life I watched people allow the world to shape them, to dictate their choices, to mold them into the clay globe that is earth. To be part of, to fit in. I watched their interior and exterior layers be thinned out by society. But me? I'm like an open wound, instead. I'm the thing you can't bandage. I'm that ugly scar that isn't going away. I'm a reminder of pain, of truth, of brutality. Nobody likes brutality. Nobody likes harsh truths. And, you know what? I'm fucking okay with that.

I also observe that she does not fret much nor look in the glass, and has not even mentioned a very pretty ring which she wears, so I conclude that she has learned to think of other people more and of herself less, and has decided to try and mold her character as carefully as she molds her little clay figures. I am glad of this, for though I should be very proud of a graceful statue made by her, I shall be infinitely prouder of a lovable daughter with a talent for making life beautiful to herself and others.

In New York, Goldman continued her defense of Berkman. As his lover and co-conspirator she had become an overnight sensation, packing in as many as 1,000 anarchists in a Bowery hall. “The report of Berkman’s shot will be heard all over the world and echo down the ages,” she told them. “Other deeds like this will follow until capital is dead,” she continued, speaking in German. “His bullets did not kill, but others are being molded, and they will fly with surer aim.” Newspapers across the country carried reports of her speech, calling her the “anarchist Cleopatra.

People are a lot like clay. They come in differing shades and consistencies and are easier to mold than one might think. Sometimes, they harden up a bit. Sometimes, God adds a little water to soften them. In every aspect—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually—a person can be successfully pressed and turned and smoothed by degrees. These subtle changes often go unnoticed until added upon over time. The sad thing isn’t how our claylike qualities give so easily to change. No. What is sad is the innumerable people who fail to realize they have the tools to mold their own clay.

I AM NOT EVIL. Then why do you destroy? CLARIFY. You do heinous things. EXPOUND. You kill. THOSE THAT ARE KILLED BECOME ANOTHER THING. Yes, dead! Destroyed. DEFINE DESTROY. To demolish, damage, ruin, kill. DEFINE CREATE. To give rise to, fashion something from nothing, take raw material and invent something new. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NOTHING. ALL IS SOMETHING. WHERE DOES YOUR “RAW MATERIAL” COME FROM? WAS IT NOT SOMETHING BEFORE YOU FORCED IT TO BECOME SOMETHING ELSE? Clay is just a lump of clay before an artist molds it into a beautiful vase. LUMP. BEAUTIFUL. OPINION. SUBJECTIVE. THE CLAY WAS SOMETHING. PERHAPS YOU WERE AS UNIMPRESSED WITH IT AS I AM BY HUMANS, YET YOU CANNOT DENY IT WAS ITS ESSENTIAL SELF. YOU SMASHED IT, STRETCHED IT, PULLED IT, SMELTED IT, DYED IT, AND FORCED IT TO BECOME SOMETHING ELSE. YOU IMPOSED YOUR WILL UPON IT. AND YOU CALL THIS CREATION? I TAKE A BEING AND MAKE ITS MOLECULES REST. HOW IS THAT NOT CREATION? IT WAS ONE THING AND IS ANOTHER. ONCE IT ATE, NOW IT IS EATEN. DID I NOT CREATE SUSTENANCE FOR ANOTHER WITH ITS NEW STATE? CAN THERE BE ANY ACT OF CREATION THAT DOES NOT FIRST DESTROY? VILLAGES FALL. CITIES RISE. HUMANS DIE. LIFE SPRINGS FROM THE SOIL WHEREIN THEY LIE. IS NOT ANY ACT OF DESTRUCTION, SHOULD TIME ENOUGH PASS, AN ACT OF CREATION?

Now drawing four fingers up the sides of her stomach, my hands create a kind of invisible wave that sounds beneath her skin. Molding her torso every which way as if it were clay for me to experiment, I study the lines of her iridescent form flowing in a rhythmic beauty that fascinates me into this fixation. My finger circles around the rim of her belly button as if to enjoy the sounds that might come from a crystal glass. Her every touch absorbs my ability to discern thought as I become rested in this feeling of absolute ecstasy. Life without her I know would indefinitely destroy me, having already solemnly delivered my spirit to this angel that comes down to be with me.

Look, Gray…a decent guy doesn’t just get born and grow up to be Mr. Perfect. They need to be created by a woman. They’re like a dumb blank lump of clay and you have to mold them into what you want them to be, while erasing everything their mothers ever taught them and all the horrible internet porn they’ve watched growing up.”I laughed.“I am so serious. Do not laugh. Do you realize that men actually think that porn is real? Like a girl is going to scream and thrash around like that for thirty minutes and all you have to do is be the pizza guy! The pizza guy, Grace…and they don’t ever eat the pizza first! And let’s not even talk about the fact that NO real girls look THAT good! It’s like they all come from the planet Nocellulite-us.

We were in Julie’s room one night, my eldest daughter and I, maybe a decade ago now. I wanted to show her how the canvas painting she had carefully labored over for her little sister's Christmas gift was framed and hung on the wall. I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art”. Bella looked at me quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world. “Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real” And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student. Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be. ~~~~~ art is always real. all of it. even the stuff you don’t understand. even the stuff you don’t like. even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder? still art. the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critiqued to death? it’s art. the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world? definitely art. the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows? art. art. art. the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light. the dress you want to sew. the song you want to sing. the clay you’ve not yet molded. everything you have made or will one day make or imagine making in your wildest dreams. it’s all real, every last bit. because there is no such thing as art that is not real.

When I heard about the path, I had to come down and see it for myself. I had heard about it before but didn’t really think it existed.” Zach was quick with his questions. “What do you think it is, and who made it?” he asked. Jeff looked at the boy, then back at Rock. “It’s my theory that Native Americans made the path using a giant shell for a mold. It’s the shape of a Noble Pen Shell, which is odd, because this shell is only found in the Mediterranean Sea. It could have been brought here from across the sea by early traders though - something to trade to the Indians in exchange for rich minerals such as gold or silver. They would have been fascinated by a shell this large and odd shaped. “The mold would have been filled with a crushed base layer, probably ground oyster shell, sand, rock and maybe even non-porous clay - then mixed with a binding agent, I have no idea what until I analyze it.

These samurai swords were made from a special type of steel called tamahagane, which translates as “jewel steel,” made from the volcanic black sand of the Pacific (this consists mostly of an iron ore called magnetite, the original material for the needle of compasses). This steel is made in a huge clay vessel four feet tall, four feet wide, and twelve feet long called a tatara. The vessel is “fired”—hardened from molded clay into a ceramic—by lighting a fire inside it. Once fired, it is packed meticulously with layers of black sand and black charcoal, which are consumed in the ceramic furnace. The process takes about a week and requires constant attention from a team of four or five people, who make sure that the temperature of the fire is kept high enough by pumping air into the tatara using a manual bellows. At the end the tatara is broken open and the tamahagane steel is dug out of the ash and remnants of sand and charcoal. These lumps of discolored steel are very unprepossessing, but they have a whole range of carbon content, some of it very low and some of it high. The samurai innovation was to be able to distinguish high-carbon steel, which is hard but brittle, from low-carbon steel, which is tough but relatively soft. They did this purely by how it looked, how it felt in their hands, and how it sounded when struck. By separating the different types of steel, they could make sure that the low-carbon steel was used to make the center of the sword. This gave the sword an enormous toughness, almost a chewiness, meaning that the blades were unlikely to snap in combat. On the edge of the blades they welded the high-carbon steel, which was brittle but extremely hard and could therefore be made very sharp. By using the sharp high-carbon steel as a wrapper on top of the tough low-carbon steel they achieved what many thought impossible: a sword that could survive impact with other swords and armor while remaining sharp enough to slice a man’s head off. The best of both worlds.

When God created man,” Chiun had said, “he put a lump of clay in the oven. And when he took it out, he said, ‘It is underdone. This is no good. I have created a white man.’ Then he put another lump of clay in the oven, and to compensate for his error, he left it in longer. When he took it out, he said, ‘Oh, I have failed again. I have left it in too long. This is no good. I have created a black man.’ And then he put another lump of clay in the oven, this time a superior clay, molded with more care and love and integrity, and when he took it out, he said: ‘Oh, I have done it just right. I have created the yellow man.’ “And then to this man in whom he was pleased he gave a mind. To the Chinese, he gave lust and dishonesty. To the Japanese, he gave arrogance and greed. To the Koreans, he gave honesty, courage, integrity, discipline, beauty of thought, heart and wisdom. And because he had given them so much, he said, ‘I shall also give them poverty and conquerors because they have been given more already than any other man on earth. They are truly the perfect people in my sight, and in their wonderfulness, I am well pleased.’” Remo

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

The compulsion for me to get my cotton-pickin’ fingers on my fellow man is the natural result of my belief that I have the word. If I do have the word and feel surrounded by unmolded clay, I have no choice but to mold. When I do this, I begin playing God, and as a result usually raise the devil.

He noticed the children less and less. He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense, as a potter with clay to be molded.

No nation influenced American thinking more profoundly than Germany, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Beard, Walter Weyl, Richard Ely, Richard Ely, Nicholas Murray Butler, and countless other founders of modern American liberalism were among the nine thousand Americans who studied in German universities during the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the six first officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. By their own testimony, these intellectuals felt "liberated" by the experience of studying in an intellectual environment predicated on the assumption that experts could mold society like clay. No European statesman loomed larger in the minds and hearts of American progressives than Otto von Bismarck. As inconvenient as it may be for those who have been taught "the continuity between Bismarck and Hitler", writes Eric Goldman, Bismarck's Germany was "a catalytic of American progressive thought". Bismarck's "top-down socialism", which delivered the eight-hour workday, healthcare, social insurance, and the like, was the gold standard for enlightened social policy. "Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy; assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old", he famously told the Reichstag in 1862. Bismarck was the original "Third Way" figure who triangulated between both ends of the ideological spectrum. "A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward", he proclaimed. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 national Progressive Party platform conspicuously borrowed from the Prussian model. Twenty-five years earlier, the political scientist Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's welfare state was an "admirable system . . . the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world.

For he has faith enough, he feels, if he were really to delve into himself, faith enough to move mountains, but he cannot manage to put his back into it. Once in a while the need to create wells up in him, the longing to see a part of himself set free in a work by him, and for days at a time his being can be tensed with joyous, titanic efforts to mold the clay into his Adam. But he is never able to shape him into a semblance of his image, he does not have enough stamina to maintain the self-discipline that it demands. It make take weeks for him to give up the work, but he does give it up, and irritably asks himself why he should keep on: what more does he have to gain? He has enjoyed the pleasure of creation, the tedium of upbringing remains, to nurse, nurture, and support entirely - why? for whom? He is no pelican, he says. But whatever he says, he is still ill at ease and feels that he has not done justice to the expectations he has of himself. It doesn’t help him to confront these expectations and try to doubt that their demands on him are justified. He is faced with a choice, and he must choose; for life is such that when the first youth is gone, sooner or later - depending on the natural disposition of the person - sooner or later a day dawns when resignation comes to you like a seducer and tempts you, and you have to say farewell to the impossible and accept it.

Perhaps the solicitation to pamper the way men live is too strong for them, for much of the business of philosophy at the present time seems to be to give high-sounding names to cover the sins of men. The clay is now molding the potter and the marble carving out the sculptor.

Dreams are the clay through which we mold our art.

if you’re having kids because you think they’re a block of clay to mold into what you want them to be, it’s really important to know that although you may be able to control their behavior, you’re not changing who they fundamentally are.

It feels like hands smoothing into wet clay. No matter the divots in our bodies, we mold together perfectly.

It’s not quite the same. He doesn’t worry about me like your mom worries about you. He wouldn’t care that I’d left school and borrowed his jet unless he needed it for business. Then he’d be furious. He is many things, but a grandfather is not one of them. I’m just a piece of clay he’s constantly trying to mold into shape. He wants me to be just like him and doesn’t care what it takes to make me that way.

We forge our destiny with our own hands, yet our destiny molds us like clay..

The Dark Cloud Is something that hangs above my head every single day Is a place that wants to always get its own way Is located in a region of your brain that wants to stay Is a sculpture that is molded entirely out of clay

But history is so often molded from tainted clay by those who remain

In music, time is inseparable from sound itself. A piece of music is a multidimensional entity, a creation molded from time’s clay.

His hands dug into my waist, holding me immobile and recklessly affected. A supple piece of clay to be molded by an erotic artist. He was a god of seduction. How did this man wield such power over me?

Katherine Hampsten says it’s like a game of catch with a lump of clay. Each person catches it and molds it with their perceptions before tossing it back. Things like education, race, gender, age, relationship with the other person, frame of mind, connotations of words, and distractions all influence how the clay is shaped.

She had teased me, not cruelly, not like my tormentors, but like a lover. Her power slipped from something menacing to something heady, leading me under her seductive spell until I was clay for her to mold.

I see a great distinction between beaten, bitter, and broken. When we’re beaten, we are in a sense limp and useless. We’re like clay that dissolves at a touch. The potter can’t do anything with us because we don’t hold our shape. But when we’re bitter, we’re like a single piece of clay that’s grown hard and inflexible. We’re equally useless to the potter because we aren’t malleable. The shape we’re in doesn’t do any good to anyone, and the potter can’t mold us into a new and better form. Being broken, however, is a different story. Like Leslie, we may be shattered into pieces, but there is strength in those pieces. When we invite the potter to combine His skill with our strength, little though it might be, He molds us into a new, more useful, and more lasting form—one even stronger than before. The reality is that choosing to move into brokenness sometimes feels impossible. We can be so overwhelmed that we live in defeat for months or even years before we are able to invite God to work with our broken pieces. Sometimes bitterness rules our thoughts and actions, and it takes a lifetime to work out our escape. Sometimes we bounce back and forth or experience all three. Some of us never escape. The good news is that God is always with us: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Heb. 13:5). He is standing by, always ready to turn on the potter’s wheel and gently mold us into the shape we were meant for, if we can just find the will to give Him the chance.

PAIN, NOT UNLIKE CLAY, stretches and molds us into someone we never knew existed. There’s beauty in that. Beauty most people can’t, don’t want to, or are afraid to see. Every scar we carry, physical or emotional, is unique. Nobody’s pain feels exactly the same because I can’t experience what you have.

God rules by the Bible. By this book, he declares that he is the creator and that man is the creature. As the potter has the right to mold anything that he pleases out of clay, God has the right as creator to make any creature his wishes, and to make the creature for any purpose he wishes. By this book, God tells man his place as creature in the universe and in history. He tells man the standard by which he must conduct himself in this world, and he demands man to obey it.

In Rank’s inspired conceptualization, the difference is put like this: … it is this very fact of the ideologization of purely psychical conflicts that makes the difference between the productive and the unproductive types, the artist and the neurotic; for the neurotic’s creative power, like the most primitive artist’s, is always tied to his own self and exhausts itself in it, whereas the productive type succeeds in changing this purely subjective creative process into an objective one, which means that through ideologizing it he transfers it from his own self to his work.18 The neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondriacal fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him on whom he is dependent become his therapeutic work project; he takes out his subjective problems on them. But people are not clay to be molded; they have needs and counter-wills of their own. The neurotic’s frustration as a failed artist can’t be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner.

Elohim was like a potter who molded the clay any which way he desired. Yahweh has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills. If Yahweh had sent such a spirit upon Saul, then it must mean the confirmation of Samuel’s curse. Yahweh had rejected Saul. Would Yahweh reject Saul’s entire bloodline as well, including Jonathan? Yahweh has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills. He decided that he would support whomever Yahweh chose as his messiah king in place of Saul because he had no aspirations to greatness or glory. He only wanted to be good, and he knew that the great were rarely the good and the good were rarely the great.

The Phenomenon of Life {Couplet} The potter's some man of clay who's molding clay, a robot making an automaton; Every day we recreate ourselves from what bricks we're made, how wondrous life's phenomenon!

Many years ago, an anonymous poet wrote these lines to describe how God shapes us and refines us for His use: When God wants to drill a man, And thrill a man, And skill a man; When God wants to mold a man To play the noblest part, When He yearns with all His heart To create so great and bold a man That all the world shall be amazed, Watch His methods, watch His ways— How He ruthlessly perfects Whom He royally elects. How He hammers him and hurts him, And with mighty blows, converts him Into trial shapes of clay Which only God understands, While his tortured heart is crying, And he lifts beseeching hands. How He bends but never breaks When his good He undertakes. How He uses whom He chooses, And with every purpose, fuses him, By every act, induces him To try His splendor out. God knows what He’s about.

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.

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.

They’re frightened of you,” he had repeated, his breath coming out in a sort of hiss, like he had forgotten he was talking to a child. “And so let them. Empty-brained fools, they think of nothing beyond painting their faces and picking what dress to wear for the day. They’ll bear children and be forgotten in the vestiges of time. You…” You. I did not have the capability to form the right words to say it then—and even if I did, I would never have, not to Yeshin’s face—but it shook me every time he said that, every time he said you and looked deep into me like he was molding me out of clay and breathing life into my lungs. As if, from the mere word alone, he was creating this image of him that would carry everything he ever was and everything he could never be.

A good human being can still be molded from bad clay

Professional developers are so certain of their code and tests that they are maddeningly casual about making random, opportunistic changes. They'll change the name of a class, on a whim. They'll notice a long-ish method while reading through a module and repartition it as a matter of course They'll transform a switch statement into polymorphic deployment, or collapse an inheritance hierarchy into a chain-of-command. In short, they treat software the way a sculptor treats clay-they continuously shape and mold it.

Timing is a big factor in seeing our desires met, and God’s timing is perfect. Do not give up on a dream if it seems impossible or out of reach. Nothing is impossible for Yahweh! However, because man has the gift of free will and continually chooses rebellion and sin over submission, the heavenly Father may need time to align events and transform hearts. It takes time to mold self-willed lumps of clay into vessels of honor and gratitude.