“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!”
Odysseus, Book XI, line 840
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)
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Nikos Kazantzakis 222
Greek writer 1883–1957Related quotes

Statement to a TImes reporter in 1990, as quoted in "The wit and wisdom of Boris" in Guardian Unlimited (23 April 2007)
1990s

Prelude
Middlemarch (1871)
Context: Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”
Source: The Theater and Its Double
Late Answer: A Civil War Seminar

“Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?”
Source: Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang