So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

It is obvious that [leftists] are not cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality.

You mess with people’s religion and you mess with fire. Even people who don’t much give a damn. Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational.

Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.

Eduquer, c'est allumer un feu

People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes.

If we are to be morally and ethically responsible, there can be no turning back once we find, as we have found, that some of the most basic presuppositions of these values are mistaken. Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

But that disease when soberly defined
Is the false fire of an o'erheated mind.

Once you've got — actually got — an idea that is whirring around so fast that no other light or contrary evidence can come in, I think it's very dangerous.

We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within.

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.

Now our minds are like smoke, then they shall be like fire.

Unknown those powers that raise the soul to flame,
Catch every nerve, and vibrate through the frame.
Their level life is but a mouldering fire,
Unquenched by want, unfanned by strong desire.