L'absence diminue les médiocres passions, et augmente les grandes, comme le vent éteint les bougies et allume le feu.
http://books.google.com/books?id=QSdPNfXQavAC&q=%22L'absence+diminue+les+m%C3%A9diocres+passions+et+augmente+les+grandes+comme+le+vent+%C3%A9teint+les+bougies+et+allume+le+feu%22&pg=PA75#v=onepage
Variant translation: Absence weakens the minor passions and adds to the effects of great ones, as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
Maxim 276.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
L'absence diminue les médiocres passions, et augmente les grandes, comme le vent éteint les bougies et allume le feu.
http://books.google.com/books?id=QSdPNfXQavAC&q=%22L'absence+diminue+les+m%C3%A9diocres+passions+et+augmente+les+grandes+comme+le+vent+%C3%A9teint+les+bougies+et+allume+le+feu%22&pg=PA75#v=onepage
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
“Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”
Biko
Song lyrics, Peter Gabriel (III) (1980)
This is how the spirit comes. After the gale, the earthquake, and fire: a gentle, cooling breeze. This is how it will come in our own day as well. We are passing through the period of earthquake, the fire is approaching, and eventually (when? after how many generations?) the gentle, cool breeze will blow.
"The Desert. Sinai.", Ch. 21, p. 278
Report to Greco (1965)
“Wind indeed increases fire, but custom love.”
"Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus" (1904)
Florilegium
Source: Message in a Bottle
“So Florimel extinguished the candle, with a good-will that delighted Jurgen.”
Source: Jurgen (1919), Ch. 37 : Invention of the Lovely Vampire
Context: Let us extinguish this candle says Jurgen, "for I have seen so many flames to-day that my eyes are tired."
So Florimel extinguished the candle, with a good-will that delighted Jurgen. And now they were in utter darkness, and in the dark nobody can see what is happening. But that Florimel now trusted Jurgen and his Noumarian claims was evinced by her very first remark.
"I was in the beginning suspicious of your majesty," said Florimel, "because I had always heard that every emperor carried a magnificent sceptre, and you then displayed nothing of the sort. But now, somehow, I do not doubt you any longer. And of what is your majesty thinking?"
"Why, I was reflecting, my dear," says Jurgen, "that my father imagines things very satisfactorily."
“For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye….”
Tom, Scene Seven
Source: The Glass Menagerie (1944)
Context: Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! — for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura — and so goodbye…
Precis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope, January 1656 - December 1658, Riebeeck's Journal, H. C. V. Leibrandt, Cape Town 1897, p. 117
On the 3rd of May 1658 Jan van Riebeeck gave further instructions to the men on Robben Island;
“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
