Flames Quotes - Page 20

• Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Night, Numbers, Space

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.180

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• People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal souls, and that it was only in the city that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had an unobscured glow.

  George William Russell

  Country, Stupid, Men

  George William Russell (1913). “Co-operation and Nationality: A Guide for Rural Reformers from this to the Next Generation”

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• In every combustion there is disengagement of the matter of fire or of light. A body can burn only in pure air [oxygen]. There is no destruction or decomposition of pure air and the increase in weight of the body burnt is exactly equal to the weight of air destroyed or decomposed. The body burnt changes into an acid by addition of the substance that increases its weight. Pure air is a compound of the matter of fire or of light with a base. In combustion the burning body removes the base, which it attracts more strongly than does the matter of heat, which appears as flame, heat and light.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Science, Fire, Light

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• Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.

  Henry Beston

  Song, Beach, Ocean

  Henry Beston, Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth (2001). “The Best of Beston: A Selection from the Natural World of Henry Beston from Cape Cod to the St. Lawrence”, p.38, David R. Godine Publisher

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• I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.

  Cesare Pavese

  Morning, Night, Cities

  Cesare Pavese (1968). “Selected Works: Translated from the Italian and with an Introd. by R. W. Flint”

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• The pious farmer, who ne'er misses pray'rs, With patience suffers unexpected rain; He blesses Heav'n for what its bounty spares, And sees, resign'd, a crop of blighted grain. But, spite of sermons, farmers would blaspheme, If a star fell to set their thatch on flame.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Stars, Rain, Missing

  Mary Wortley Montagu, James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie Wharncliffe (1837). “The Letters and Works: In Three Volumes”, p.425

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• Ye youths and virgins, when your generous blood Has drunk the warmth of fifteen summers, now The loves invite; now to new rapture wakes The finish'd sense: while stung with keen desire The madd'ning boy his bashful fetters bursts; And, urg'd with secret flames, the riper maid, Conscious and shy, betrays her smarting breast.

  John Armstrong

  Summer, Boys, Blood

  John Armstrong, “The Oeconomy Of Love”

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• For wisest ends this universal Power Gave appetites, from whose quick impulse life Subsists, by which we only live, all life Insipid else, unactive, unenjoy'd. Hence to this peopled earth, which, that extinct, That flame for propagation, soon would roll A lifeless mass, and vainly cumber heaven.

  John Armstrong

  Heaven, Earth, Appetite

  John Armstrong (1770). “The forced marriage, a tragedy. Sketches: or, Essays on various subjects, by Launcelot Temple, Esq”

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• When Israel, of the Lord belov'd, Out of the land of bondage came, Her fathers' God before her mov'd, An awful guide in smoke and flame.

  Walter Scott

  Father, Israel, Land

  Walter Scott (1862). “Ivanhoe: A Romance”, p.326

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• The loves of men but vary in degrees-- They find no new expression for the flame.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Love, Men, Expression

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2013). “Poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Passion”, p.23, eBookIt.com

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• Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

  James Joyce

  Ideas, Fire, Giving

  James Joyce (2005). “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, p.138, Collector's Library

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• In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame.

  James Joyce

  Pain, Fire, Long

  James Joyce (2013). “The Best of James Joyce”, p.268, Simon and Schuster

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• In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt--a wind to freeze; Sad patience--joyous energies; Humility--yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity--reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel--Art.

  Herman Melville

  Dream, Art, Hate

  Herman Melville, Robert C. Ryan, Hershel Parker (2009). “Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville”, p.280, Northwestern University Press

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• I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame And every time I pass that way I always hear my name

  Bob Dylan

  Names, Temptation, Doorways

  Song: Every Grain Of Sand, Album: Shot of Love, 1981

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• Fire is fed by fire. The same small flame destroys Two stalks of wheat at once.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Two, Fire, Wheat

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• The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

  R. D. Laing

  Spring, Light, Rivers

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• In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.

  Stefan Zweig

  Love, Passion, Heart

  "Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

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• Hitherto without being; hidden away in the womb of eternity; possessed neither of thought nor feeling; remote from the range of human ken -- the Man bursts, in some unknown manner, the bars of non-existence, and announces with a cry the beginning of his brief life. In the night of non-existence there bursts forth also a little candle, lit by an unseen hand. Mark well its flame: for it is the life of that Man.

  Leonid Andreyev

  Night, Men, Hands

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• True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lonely, Children, Museums

  Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

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• We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again. We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Heart, Men, Fire

  "Bhawani Mandir (1905)". "India's Rebirth : A Selection from Sri Aurobindo's Writings, Talks and Speeches", 3rd edition. Book by Sri Aurobindo, 2000.

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• Monarch of earth, I shall confess my secret craft: I've always fought to purify wild flame to light, and kindle whatever light I found to burst in flame.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Light, Secret, Crafts

  Nikos Kazantzakis (1958). “the Odyssey a Modern Sequel”

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• I hate all virtues based on food and bloated bellies; though food and drink are good, I'm better slaked and fed by that inhuman flame which burns in our black bowels. I like to name that flame which burns within me God!

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Hate, Names, Black

  Nikos Kazantzakis (1958). “the Odyssey a Modern Sequel”

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• There is no country... where there are not somewhere lovers of freedom who look to this country to carry the torch and keep it burning bright until such time as they may again be able to light their extinguished torches at our flame. We owe it not only to our own people but to the world to preserve our soul for that.

  Stanley Baldwin

  Country, Light, People

  Stanley Baldwin's speech at University of Durham to the Ashridge Fellowship, as quoted in The Times (December 3, 1934) and in "Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933-40" by Philip Williamson in "The English Historical Review", Volume 115, No. 462 (pp. 607-642), June 2000.

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• Upon a darkened night the flame of love was burning in my breast
  And by a lantern bright I fled my house while all in quiet rest.
  Shrouded by the night and by the secret stair I quickly fled.
  The veil concealed my eyes while all within lay quiet as the dead.

  John of the Cross

  Eye, Night, House

  "The Dark Night Of The Soul" by John of the Cross, Variant adapted for music by Loreena McKennitt, 1994.

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• I think we all have a hunger that's hard to name. A lot of people who come to my retreats have never named it before, or else they've named it in church, but they can't actually see the connection between what they're doing with food and this yearning. I call it "the flame" that they have: They yearn for big answers to live a big life. But they have to start with the most basic fears.

  Geneen Roth

  Thinking, Names, People

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