Quotes about fire
page 21

Mata Amritanandamayi photo
John Bright photo
Alvin C. York photo
Muhammad al-Baqir photo

“Fasting is a shield against (hell) fire. Charity and dole remove and finish sin, as does the remembrance of God in the midnight.”

Muhammad al-Baqir (677–733) fifth of the Twelve Shia Imams

Muhammad Kulayni, Usūl al-Kāfī, vol.2, p. 23

George William Russell photo
Michael Savage photo
Jacopone da Todi photo
Charles Lyell photo
Georges Bernanos photo
Harry Turtledove photo
Elon Musk photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“Absence extinguishes the minor passions and increases the great ones, as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.”

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)

Peter Greenaway photo
David Foster Wallace photo
Neil Munro (Hugh Foulis) photo
Luís de Camões photo

“[She] heard the bitter, heartsick words
that made the fires of Hell burn cold
and soothed the lost spirits under the world.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Ela viu as palavras magoadas,
Que puderam tornar o fogo frio,
E dar descanso as almas condenadas.
tr. David Wevill
Lyric poetry, Não pode tirar-me as esperanças, Aquela triste e leda madrugada

“When challenged why he had written so little, he fired back: "Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?"”

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) American philosopher

The Independent, The Independent, Professor Sidney Morgenbesser: Philosopher celebrated for his withering New York Jewish humour http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-sidney-morgenbesser-550224.html, 6 August 2004. The Times, Sidney Morgenbesser: Erudite and influential American linguistic philosopher with the analytical acuity of Spinoza and the blunt wit of Groucho Marx https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sidney-morgenbesser-5cz8gg8qfvm, September 8, 2004.

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo
Tina Fey photo
Ernst Bloch photo
Sri Chinmoy photo
Theodore Dalrymple photo

“There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

How to murder a Bolivian boy http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/jun01/daniels.htm (June 2001).
New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

Bill Maher photo

“Van Jones got fired because he became the Scary Negro of the Week on Fox News, where, let's be honest, they still feel threatened by Harry Belafonte.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

New Rule: Float Like Obama, Sting Like Ali (2009)

Muhammad photo
Matthew Henry photo

“Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it out; and when it does come, it is out again immediately.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

Reported in The Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. Matthew Henry (1830), p. 134.

Adam Roberts photo
Conrad Aiken photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Jean Genet photo

“Euryalus, is it
the gods who put this fire in our minds,
or is it that each man's relentless longing
becomes a god to him?”

Allen Mandelbaum (1926–2011) American poet and professor of literature, translator from Latin and Italian

Book IX, lines 243–246
The Aeneid of Virgil (1971)

Nicholas Sparks photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“If I were running my business, I'd fire Rosie, I mean, I'd look her right in that fat ugly face of hers and say, "Rosie, you're fired."”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

On an interview on why he hates Rosie O'Donnell (28 August 2011)
2010s, 2011

Little Turtle photo

“My forefather kindled the first fire at Detroit; from thence, he extended his lines to the head waters of Scioto; from thence, to its mouth; from thence, down the Ohio, to the mouth of the Wabash, and from thence to Chicago, on lake Michigan”

Little Turtle (1752–1812) Chief of the Miami people (c. 1747 – July 14, 1812)

Claiming tribal lands at the Treaty of Greenville (American State Papers, Indian Affairs, vol. 1, pp. 570-571; Dft. Ex. 96).
Quotes from Michikinikwa

Adam Goldstein photo
Georgia O'Keeffe photo
Ludovico Ariosto photo

“Blind when I gave him such a trust, nor saw
How easily the fire consumes the straw.”

Cieco a dargline impresa, e non por mente
Che 'l fuoco arde la paglia facilmente.
Canto XXIV, stanza 39 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Alan Sugar photo
Ernesto Grassi photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Stanley Knowles photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Charles Bernstein photo

“Not for all the fire in hell
Not for all the blue in the sky
Not for an empire of my own
Not even for peace of mind”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

"All the Whiskey in Heaven" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/bernstein, The Nation, 3 March 2008

George W. Bush photo
Harry Chapin photo
Conrad Aiken photo
Gene Youngblood photo
Halldór Laxness photo

“The fire's hottest for the one who burns himself.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Jón Hreggviðsson
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part I: Iceland's Bell

Victor Villaseñor photo
William Blake photo

“Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Argument
1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)

George William Curtis photo

“The relation between physical sanitary laws and the national welfare is now hardly disputed. At this moment the cholera is stealthily feeling its terrible way along the edges of Europe to this country, and there is not an intelligent man who does not know that it is a divine vengeance upon uncleanliness. Let it seize the unclean city of New York, and it will riot in horror and devastation. Panic will empty the palaces, trade will stop in the warehouses. Those who can will flee, while the poor and wretched, poisoned in tenement-houses, will be huddled in heaps of agony and death. Does any man say that cholera is God's remedy for overpopulation? On the contrary, it is only the ghastly proof that God's laws of human health are disregarded. It is not a proclamation that the world is over-peopled; it is merely a warning for the world to provide decently for its population. God does not create men in his image to rot in tenement-houses, and he will make squalor and filth and misery plague-spots threatening the fairest prosperity, until that prosperity acknowledges in vast sanitary reforms that cleanliness is next to godliness. And if the dread pestilence now approaching our shores would frighten us into universal purgation of our foul cities, it would be seen at this moment hovering in the wintry air, not an angry demon, but a stem angel with a sword of fire to open the path of knowledge and humanity and civilization.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Statius photo

“He straightway spreads his arms about the garlanded fire, and absorbs the prophetic vapours with glowing countenance.”
Ille coronatos iamdudum amplectitur ignes, fatidicum sorbens vultu flagrante vaporem.

Source: Thebaid, Book X, Line 604 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

Winston S. Churchill photo
Pat Conroy photo

“The children of fighter pilots tell different stories than other kids do. None of our fathers can write a will or sell a life insurance policy or fill out a prescription or administer a flu shot or explain what a poet meant. We tell of fathers who land on aircraft carriers at pitch-black night with the wind howling out of the China Sea. Our fathers wiped out aircraft batteries in the Philippines and set Japanese soldiers on fire when they made the mistake of trying to overwhelm our troops on the ground. Your Dads ran the barber shops and worked at the post office and delivered the packages on time and sold the cars, while our Dads were blowing up fuel depots near Seoul, were providing extraordinarily courageous close air support to the beleaguered Marines at the Chosin Reservoir, and who once turned the Naktong River red with blood of a retreating North Korean battalion. We tell of men who made widows of the wives of our nations' enemies and who made orphans out of all their children. You don't like war or violence? Or napalm? Or rockets? Or cannons or death rained down from the sky? Then let's talk about your fathers, not ours. When we talk about the aviators who raised us and the Marines who loved us, we can look you in the eye and say "you would not like to have been American's enemies when our fathers passed overhead". We were raised by the men who made the United States of America the safest country on earth in the bloodiest century in all recorded history. Our fathers made sacred those strange, singing names of battlefields across the Pacific: Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh and a thousand more. We grew up attending the funerals of Marines slain in these battles. Your fathers made communities like Beaufort decent and prosperous and functional; our fathers made the world safe for democracy.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot (1998)

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy photo
Roger Bacon photo

“Everything in nature completes its action through its own force and species alone… as, for example, fire by its own force dries and consumes and does many things. Therefore vision must perform the act of seeing by its own force. But the act of seeing is the perception of a visible object at a distance, and therefore vision perceives what is visible by its own force multiplied to the object. Moreover, the species of the things of world are not fitted by nature to effect the complete act of vision at once, because of its nobleness. Hence these must be aided by the species of the eye, which travels in the locality of the visual pyramid, and changes the medium and ennobles it, and renders it analogous to vision, and so prepares the passage of the species itself of the visible object… Concerning the multiplication of this species, moreover, we are to understand that it lies in the same place as the species of the thing seen, between the sight and the thing seen, and takes place along the pyramid whose vertex is in the eye and base in the thing seen. And as the species of an object in the same medium travels in a straight path and is refracted in different ways when it meets a medium of another transparency, and is reflected when it meets the obstacles of a dense body; so is it also true of the species of vision that it travels altogether along the path of the species itself of the visible object.”

Bacon, like Grosseteste, asserts that both the active extramitted species of vision from the eye, and the intramitted species of light from object seen, were necessary for sight.
v. i. vii. 4, ed. Briggs as quoted in A.C. Crombie, Robert Grossetest and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)
Opus Majus, c. 1267

James Jeffrey Roche photo
Orson Pratt photo
Amir Khusrow photo

“They pursued die enemy to the gates and set everything on fire. They burnt down all those gardens and groves. That paradise of idol-worshippers became like hell. The fire-worshippers of Bud were in alarm and flocked round their idols…”

Amir Khusrow (1253–1325) Indian poet, writer, musician and scholar

About Sultan Mubarak Shah Khalji (AD 1316-1320) in Warrangal (Andhra Pradesh) Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians,Vol. III, p. 559
Nuh Siphir

“I drank a thimble full of fire and I'm not ever coming back.”

Messes of Men.
Brother, Sister (2006)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon photo

“[the United States is like] a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.”

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862–1933) British Liberal statesman

Remember by Winston Churchill in 1941 as a remark made by Edward Grey 'more than thirty years ago' .
Reproduced in The Second World War, Vol III, The Grand Alliance, 1950, Cassell & Co Ltd, p. 540.

J. William Fulbright photo

“The junior Senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatred of uninformed and credulous people that he has started a prairie fire, which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

On Joseph McCarthy (November 30, 1954), in Fulbright of Arkansas: The Public Positions of a Private Thinker (1963)

George Eliot photo
Michael Hudson (economist) photo
African Spir photo
Sarah McLachlan photo
Andrew Marvell photo
Philip Pullman photo
Michael Chabon photo
Margaret Cho photo
Haruo Nakajima photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo

“Life is fired at us point blank.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

More context: "To live or to be alive or, what is the same thing, to be a man, does not admit of any preparations or preliminary experiments. Life is fired at us point blank. ... Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we were born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim."
Man and People [El hombre y la gente] (1957), p. 42, translated by Willard R. Trask. ISBN 0-393-00123-7

Harry Turtledove photo
Michelle Lambert photo
Eleanor Farjeon photo
Francis Thompson photo

“Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare;
And left the flushed print in a poppy there:
Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,
And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

The Poppy http://books.google.com/books?id=qM8VAAAAYAAJ&q="Summer+set+lip+to+earth's+bosom+bare+And+left+the+flushed+print+in+a+poppy+there+Like+a+yawn+of+fire+from+the+grass+it+came+And+the+fanning+wind+puffed+it+to+flapping+flame"&pg=PA6#v=onepage.

Russell Kirk photo
Richard Matheson photo

“I hate it when something I’ve had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I’ve written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

"Ed Gorman Calling: We Talk to Richard Matheson" http://www.mysteryfile.com/Matheson/Interview.html (2004)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Allen C. Guelzo photo

“I remember a rusher; not on a sports team. A rusher who carried an American flag, the regimental flag of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers. It is an attack on the Confederate fort known as Battery Wagner outside of Charleston, south Carolina, in July of 1863. 54th Massachusetts was an all black regiment, one of the first to be recruited after the Emancipation Proclamation. The attack was almost a suicide mission. the regiment swept up to the walls of the fort. penetrated briefly, only to be driven out with heavy losses. the rusher I am thinking of was the color sergeant of the regiment. his name was William H. Carney. He had been born a slave. He was now a free man and a soldier. He brought the stars and stripes off the ramparts of Fort Wagner, despite being wounded in the chest and leg, staggering back under fire to a field hospital, and there, just before he collapsed, he surrendered the flag into the hands of several others there saying, "The old flag never touched the ground, boys!" Before the first of January 1863 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law, he didn't have a flag, he doesn't have a country. He was a slave; he was an unperson. But in July of 1863, he was a free man. As a free man, there was no symbol to him of greater value than that flag. So you understand that it is difficult for me to understand why people would insult it.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

"Free Speech and the First Amendment" https://www.c-span.org/video/?437511-1/free-speech-amendment&start=150 (20 November 2017), C-SPAN
2010s

“Such was the man who was sent on an embassy to Ajmir, in order that the Rai (Pithaura) of that country might see the right way without the intervention of the sword, and that he might incline from the track of opposition into the path of propriety, leaving his airy follies for the institutes of the knowledge of Allah, and acknowledging the expediency of uttering the words of martyrdom and repeating the precepts of the law, and might abstain from infidelity and darkness, which entails the loss of this world and that to come, and might place in his ear the ring of slavery to the sublime Court (may Allah exalt it!) which is the centre of justice and mercy, and the pivot of the Sultans of the worldand by these means and modes might cleanse the fords of good life from the sins of impurity'…'The army of Islam was completely victorious, and 'an hundred thousand grovelling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell'… After this great victory, the army of Islam marched forward to Ajmir, where it arrived at a fortunate moment and under an auspicious bird, and obtained so much booty and wealth, that you might have said that the secret depositories of the seas and hills had been revealed….'While the Sultan remained at Ajmir, he destroyed the pillars and foundations of the idol temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and the precepts of Islam, and the customs of the law were divulged and established”

Hasan Nizami Persian language poet and historian

About the conquest of Ajmer (Rajasthan) Hasan Nizami: Taju’l-Ma’sir, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 213-216. Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

Mark Ames photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Kate Bush photo

“See how the child reaches out instinctively
To feel how fire will feel.
See how the man reaches out instinctively
For what he cannot have.
The pull and the push of it all.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

William Saroyan photo

“Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

Mike Oldfield photo

“I'm a fire without a flame, desert with no rain…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Heaven's Open (1991)

Thomas Fuller photo

“He will make a strange combustion in the state of his soul, who at the landing of every cockboat sets the beacons on fire.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

Of Anger.
The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Muhammad of Ghor photo