
The Parish Register (1807), Part i, "Introduction". Compare "How commentators each dark passage shun, / And hold their farthing candle to the sun", Edward Young, Love of Fame, Satire vii, Line 97.
Satire VII, l. 97.
Love of Fame (1725-1728)
The Parish Register (1807), Part i, "Introduction". Compare "How commentators each dark passage shun, / And hold their farthing candle to the sun", Edward Young, Love of Fame, Satire vii, Line 97.
“Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you're a flame in the dark.”
“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”
As quoted in 7 Laws of Human Nature: The Oneness of Universal Love (2017) by Conrad Spainhower and other self-help books and quotation sites.
Disputed
“We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)
Context: We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
“It is not necessary to light a candle to the sun.”
Source: Discourses Concerning Government (1689), Ch. 2, Sect. 18; comparable to: "Like his that lights a candle to the sun", John Fletcher, Letter to Sir Walter Aston; "And hold their farthing candle to the sun", Edward Young, Satire vii. line 56.
“Most wretched is the mortal that would shun
To look upon the visage of the sun.”
Misero è ben chi veder schiva il sole!
Canto XXXII, stanza 23 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)
“To enlarge or illustrate this power and effect of love is to set a candle in the sun.”
Section 2, member 1, subsection 2.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III