Flames quotes
839 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside flames — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I think we all have a hunger that's hard to name. A lot of people who come to my retreats have never named it before, or else they've named it in church, but they can't actually see the connection between what they're doing with food and this yearning. I call it "the flame" that they have: They yearn for big answers to live a big life. But they have to start with the most basic fears."
"Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away."
"True beauty dwells on high: ours is a flame But borrowed thence to light us thither. Beauty and beauteous words should go together."
"As flames do work and wind when they ascend, So did I weave myself into the sense."
"True beauty lives on high. Ours is but a flame borrowed thence."
"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!"
"One voyage to the East and a man could live as rich as a lord until the end of his days. When he'd been younger, Davos had dreamed of making such voyages himself. But the years went dancing by like moths around a flame, and somehow the time had never been quite right."
"Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit."
"Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.' My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory."
"Let me leap naked through life's testing flame, And bear to lose, and yet endure to win."
"She felt a little nervous about this; 'for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, 'in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing."
"The smoking flax before it burst to flame Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."
"The flame is not as bright to itself as it is to those it illuminates: so too the sage."
"Even now, nature is the only flame, on which the poetic spirit feeds; from it alone it draws all its power, to it alone it speaks even in the artificial, in the man engaged in culture."
"I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID."
"What would you pack for Armageddon? Sunscreen and shades? Flame-proof underwear? Maybe a travel guide to the Underworld?"
"Mencheres slid through the water toward her, drawn by the same inexorable compulsion that led moths to dance with flames. He'd had several lifetimes' worth of reason, cold machinations, and, ultimately, emptiness. Perhaps the moths knew what he didn't, that the joy of the flame was worth the price of destruction."
"Words.” His tone sharpened. “I shared my house, my bed, and my blood with you, as well as offered you a place in my life forever. What are words compared to that?” I sighed, my anger dissipating as quickly as his flames had. “Oh, Vlad, if you believed that, you would’ve told me what I wanted to hear to just appease me. You didn’t, which proves saying ‘I love you’ means more to you than everything else."
"I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame."
"This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames."
