Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.
—Bernard Williams
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air, and water. Men can employ it as a tool, or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.
—Lewis H. Lapham
The sky broke like an egg into full sunset and the water caught fire.
—Pamela Hansford Johnson
After the earthquake and the fire comes the still, small voice.
—Dorothy Thompson
Love in its essence is spiritual fire.
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca
We take other men's knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor's house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?
—Michel de Montaigne
In 1941 Sergeant James Allen Ward was awarded the Victoria Cross for climbing out onto the wing of his Wellington bomber at thirteen thousand feet to extinguish a fire in the starboard engine. Secured only by a rope around his waist, he smothered the fire and returned along the wing to the aircraft's cabin. Winston Churchill, an admirer of swashbuckling exploits, summoned the shy New Zealander to 10 Downing Street. Struck dumb with awe in Churchill's presence, Ward was unable to answer the prime minister's questions. Churchill surveyed the unhappy hero with some compassion. "You must feel very humble and awkward in my presence," he said.
"Yes, sir," managed Ward.
"Then you can imagine how humble and awkward I feel in yours," said Churchill.
—The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.
—Italian proverb
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
—William Butler Yeats
I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.
—Kurt Vonnegut
The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.
—Dave Barry
You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.
—George Burns
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
—Plutarch
I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place.
—Steven Wright
Love is all fire; and so heaven and hell are the same place.
—Thomas Merton