Scorching Quotes

• The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.

  Napoleon Hill

  Motivational, Strength, Success

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• At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

  Frederick Douglass

  Irony, Argument, Needed

  What to the Slave is the 4th of July?, delivered 4 July 1852

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• Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Pain, Heart, Hell

  Edgar Allan Poe (1902). “The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Poems”

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• I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]

  Dani Shapiro

  Mother, Childhood, Trying

  8 Copy quote

• I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Thinking, Giving, Sun

  Jeanette Winterson (2004). “Lighthousekeeping”, Fourth Estate (GB)

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• If you have wit, use it to please and not to hurt: you may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Hurt, Humor, Shining

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.93, Oxford University Press

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• He must be independent and brave, and sure of himself and of the importance of his work, because if he isn't he will never survive the scorching blasts of derision that will probably greet his first efforts.

  Robert E. Sherwood

  Independent, Bravery, Effort

  8 Copy quote

• We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

  Louise Erdrich

  Love Is, Healthy, Brain

  9 Copy quote

• I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.

  Herman Melville

  Past, Scar

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.456

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• When the Saracens came to attack him, they threw Greek fire onto the barrier he had made; and the fire caught easily, And you should know that the Turks did not wait for the fire to burn itself out, but rushed upon the Templars among the scorching flames.

  Jean de Joinville

  War, Fire, Flames

  6 Copy quote

• ... continual hard labor deadens the energies of the soul, and benumbs the faculties of the mind; the ideas become confined, the mind barren, and, like the scorching sands of Arabia, produces nothing; or, like the uncultivated soil, brings forth thorns and thistles. Again, continual hard labor irritates our tempers and sours our dispositions; the whole system become worn out with toil and fatigue; nature herself becomes almost exhausted, and we care but little whether we live or die.

  Maria W. Stewart

  Ideas, Soul, Mind

  24 Copy quote

• Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people's lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Rain, Thinking, People

  Jhumpa Lahiri (2013). “The Lowland”, p.189, A&C Black

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• Greatness exists like an ocean within you. Why do you want to act like a fish out of water, wriggling on the sand under the scorching sun? Look! The water is just one millimeter away! Jump in!

  Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

  Self Esteem, Ocean, Greatness

  35 Copy quote

• I want to keep sleeping, but the sun outside my window has other ideas: First blind her. Then jab her eyeballs with scorching-hot daggers.

  Natasha Friend

  Sleep, Ideas, Hot

  Natasha Friend (2010). “Lush”, p.96, Scholastic Inc.

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• A frozen daiquiri of a scorching afternoon is soothing. It makes living more tolerable.

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Frozen, Afternoon, Soothing

  Tallulah Bankhead (1952). “Tallulah: My Autobiography”, p.94, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• In Shankaracharya we saw tremendous intellectual power, throwing the scorching light of reason upon everything.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Light, Intellectual, Saws

  Source: tamilandvedas.com

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• A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas. As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one’s mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane. And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.

  Adam Zagajewski

  Rain, Loss, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• The tires were scorching hot, in fact I burned my fingers on one.

  Malcolm Campbell

  Hot, Facts, Tire

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• I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I get on that accursed machine than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view - get hot, juicy, red - like a grilled chop. Get me on that machine and I have to go. I go scorching along the road, and cursing aloud at myself for doing it.

  H. G. Wells

  Flower, Exercise, Cycling

  7 Copy quote

• The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year's seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.

  Rose Wilder Lane

  Summer, Dust, Years

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• Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Mother, Moving, Thinking

  "The Flies". Play by Jean-Paul Sartre, Act 2, 1943.

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• Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching, so confidence-splattering, so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn't have to come in contact with it.

  Susan Orlean

  Car, Soul, Promise

  "Wheels" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. April 30, 2010.

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• Isabella Swan?” He looked up at me through his impossibly long lashes, his golden eyes soft but, somehow, still scorching. “I promise to love you forever—every single day of forever. Will you marry me?” There were many things I wanted to say, some of them not nice at all, and others more disgustingly gooey and romantic than he probably dreamed I was capable of. Rather than embarrass myself with either, I whispered, “Yes.” “Thank you,” he said simply. He took my left hand and kissed each of my fingertips before he kissed the ring that was now mine.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Nice, Love You, Eye

  Stephenie Meyer (2008). “Eclipse”, Little Brown & Company

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• My family lived off the land and summer evening meals featured baked stuffed tomatoes, potato salad, corn on the cob, fresh shelled peas and homemade ice cream with strawberries from our garden. With no air conditioning in those days, the cool porch was the center of our universe after the scorching days.

  David Mixner

  Summer, Garden, Ice Cream

  "Turkey Hollow Almanac: Summer Memories" by David Mixner, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 2, 2008.

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• Saints are like trees. They do not call to anyone, neither do they send anyone away. They give shelter to whoever cares to come, be it a man, woman, child, or an animal. If you sit under a tree it will protect you from the weather, from the scorching sun as well as from the pouring rain, and it will give you flowers and fruit. Whether a human being enjoys them or a bird tastes of them matters little to the tree; its produce is there for anyone who comes and takes it.

  Anandamayi Ma

  Children, Flower, Rain

  128 Copy quote