Combustion Quotes

(Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways. ~ Anthony Doerr

If I had my way," Dionysus said, "I would cause your molecules to erupt in flames. We'd sweep up the ashes and be done with a lot of trouble. But Chiron seems to feel this would be against my mission at this cursed camp: to keep you little brats safe from harm."
"Spontaneous combustion is a form of harm, Mr. D," Chiron put in.
"Nonsense," Dionysus said. "Boy wouldn't feel a thing. Nevertheless, I've agreed to restrain myself. I'm thinking of turning you into a dolphin instead, sending you back to your father. ~ Rick Riordan

I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen. ~ Kate Braverman

Whenever people nominate the world's most important inventions (the internal combustion engine, the world wide web, battery storage), I always suggest the pill and the tampon ~ Jane Caro

If I dwell at some length on the tremors and gropings of that distant night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets-not crime's prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Faerie: where it's only a little weird to realize that my boyfriend is older than the internal combustion engine. ~ Seanan McGuire

When you mix with the wrong energy, there's bound to be an explosion. Pay attention and switch lanes when the signal changes. What's really real, is ultimately revealed. ~ T.F. Hodge

Share your presence with others, no boundaries, completely, openly, lovingly. Love is what makes us alive, that is why we feel so alive when we love. Service is being available to love. Life is the combustion of love. That we love ourselves here, that is the true magnificence in the mountains of being. ~ Alex Grey

What is chemistry in a relationship, Really? Chemistry can be spontaneous combustion that excites, incites, often harms. But not understood. Chemistry can also be that which is studied, intentional, and knows how to be repeated and improved upon. Do you have the right chemistry? ~ Lucille Anderson

I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament ... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion. ~ Dorothy Parker

I believe fuel cells will finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine ... Fuel cells could be the predominant automotive power source in 25 years. ~ Bill Ford

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I like people to be surprised by the turn of events. I don't want things just to be pat and formulaic. If there's some sort of internal combustion in the character or a desire to change the way things are going, that makes for conflict, which is the essence of drama. ~ Miranda Richardson

in this you have failed
you have invalidated your dysfunctional efforts
of innocence
of perverted virginity
with a mangy face before the eye of God
not even summations of crawling
not even rust cutters or combustion
as if to test your blue vaginal mirrors
inside a Protestant Crimea
listening to your fallacious absorption neurosis

you've forfeited your flames
you've cast into the moat
salacious bonfire bathing
you've given up the power of deepened torturing rums
of magnetic chromosomal nerves
for a weakly neutered clairaudience of failure ~ Will Alexander

Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste. ~ Joseph Jenkins

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered. ~ Cyril Connolly

The harsh reality is that America moves on four wheels, powered by conventional internal-combustion engines. At this point, while the elite media (excluding Newsweek) trumpet the benefits of hybrids and Ford and Toyota plan to lead the nation into a low-powered, high-mileage hybrid Utopia, the multitudes remain loyal to the gas-guzzling family bus in the driveway. ~ Brock Yates

It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period. ~ Al Gore

In one department of his [Joseph Black's] lecture he exceeded any I have ever known, the neatness and unvarying success with which all the manipulations of his experiments were performed. His correct eye and steady hand contributed to the one; his admirable precautions, foreseeing and providing for every emergency, secured the other. I have seen him pour boiling water or boiling acid from a vessel that had no spout into a tube, holding it at such a distance as made the stream's diameter small, and so vertical that not a drop was spilt. While he poured he would mention this adaptation of the height to the diameter as a necessary condition of success. I have seen him mix two substances in a receiver into which a gas, as chlorine, had been introduced, the effect of the combustion being perhaps to produce a compound inflammable in its nascent state, and the mixture being effected by drawing some string or wire working through the receiver's sides in an air-tight socket. The long table on which the different processes had been carried on was as clean at the end of the lecture as it had been before the apparatus was planted upon it. Not a drop of liquid, not a grain of dust remained. ~ Henry Peter Brougham

Spontaneous combustion IS a form of harm, Mr. D, Chiron put in. ~ Rick Riordan

Holding back technology to reserve business models is like allowing blacksmiths to veto the internal combustion engine in order to protect their horseshoes. ~ Don Tapscott

Why do you want a letter from me? Why don't you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don't you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular 'experts' who have picked it up as inaccurately as you? Why don't you learn the facts in this field as honestly as your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook on church history will tell you where they came from?
Why do you balk at the doctrine of the Trinity - God the three in One - yet meekly acquiesce when Einstein tells you E=mc2? What makes you suppose that the expression "God ordains" is narrow and bigoted, while your own expression, "Science demands" is taken as an objective statement of fact?
You would be ashamed to know as little about internal combustion as you know about Christian beliefs.
I admit, you can practice Christianity without knowing much theology, just as you can drive a car without knowing much about internal combustion. But when something breaks down in the car, you go humbly to the man who understands the works; whereas if something goes wrong with religion, you merely throw the works away and tell the theologian he is a liar.
Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I'm giving you personal opini ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Andrus turned the engine and gave her a suspicious look. "You smell like ... " He shifted into drive. "What?" "Nothing, but - did something happen inside?" Could he really smell ... that? He crinkled his nose. "Your face is red and your scent is ... " Oh, God. He can! Kill me now! Giant bomb, falling tree, spontaneous combustion ... anything! ~ Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

Vampires, contrary to popular belief, don't incinerate when exposed to sunlight. If that were true, there would be a heck of a lot more stories about spontaneous combustion around the world. They are, however, very sensitive to sunlight and their skin cannot take long term exposure without damaging and burning it, which was painful. From Vampire Princess Rising book two of the Winters Saga ~ Jami Brumfield

In a cage of wire-ribs
The size of a man's head, the macaw bristles in a staring
Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.
In the old lady's parlour, where an aspidistra succumbs
To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs in clear flames,
Like a torturer's iron instrument preparing
With dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues,
Crimsoning into the barbs:

Or like the smouldering head that hung
In Killdevil's brass kitchen, in irons, who had been
Volcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash,
And would, one day; or a fugitive aristocrat
From some thunderous mythological hierarchy, caught
By a little boy with a crust and a bent pin,
Or snare of horsehair set for a song-thrush,
And put in a cage to sing.

The old lady who feeds him seeds
Has a grand-daughter. The girl calls him 'Poor Polly', pokes fun.
'Jolly Mop.' But lies under every full moon,
The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-still
Her brimming eyes do not tremble or spill
The dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron,
Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin:
Deep into her pillow her silence pleads.

All day he stares at his furnace
With eyes red-raw, but when she comes they close.
'Polly. Pretty Poll', she cajoles, and rocks him gently.
She caresses, whispers kisses. The blue lids stay shut.
She strikes the cage in a t ~ Ted Hughes

To me the bicycle is in many ways a more satisfactory invention than the automobile. It is consonant with the independence of man because it works under his own power entirely. There is no combustion of some petroleum product..to set the pedals going. Purely mechanical instruments like watches and bicycles are to be preferred to engines that depend on the purchase of power from foreign sources ... The price of power is enslavement. ~ Louis J. Halle

The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people
they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work. ~ Henry Ford

I'm still going to move them out of my wanigan, but I'll give you odds two-to-one that after they move out there's going to be spontaneous combustion. ~ Tom Kizzia

Listen well, as I speak of my upsurge;
For I'm a lover, without a lover

I am a flame, without a combustion
I am a novice, without a mentor

I am a healer, without a wounded
I am a winner, without a trophy

I'm a captain, without a devotee
And above all, I'm alone – not lonely ~ Zubair Ahsan

What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have. ~ Iris Murdoch

On the social front it was a question of Amistics, which was a term that had been coined ages ago by a Moiran anthropologist to talk about the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish people of pre-Zero America, who had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines. All cultures ~ Neal Stephenson

What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk? ~ Loren Eiseley

We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to.

We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on our own, wherever we happen to be at the time- in a plane, in our beds, in a car, in a space shuttle, or in a field of flowers.

And between those times, we try to connect along the way with others who are also on their own.

If we're lucky, we have a mother who reads to us.

We have a teacher or two along the way who make us feel special.

We have dogs who do the stupid dog tricks we teach them and who lie on our bed when we're not looking, because it smells like us, and so we pretend not to notice the paw prints on the bedspread.

We have friends who lend us their favorite books.

Maybe we have children, and grandchildren, and funny mailmen and eccentric great-aunts, and uncles who can pull pennies out of their ears.

All of them teach us stuff. They teach us about combustion engines and the major products of Bolivia, and what poems are not boring, and how to be kind to each other, and how to laugh, and when the vigil is in our hands, and when we have to make the best of things even though it's hard sometimes.

Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own. ~ Lois Lowry

Proceed, philosophers, teach, enlighten, enkindle, think aloud, speak aloud, run joyously towards the bright daylight, fraternise in the public squares, announce the glad tidings, scatter plenteously your alphabets, proclaim human rights, sing your Marseillaises, sow enthusiasms, broadcast, tear off green branches from the oak trees. Make thought a whirlwind. This multitude can be sublimated. Let us learn to avail ourselves of this vast combustion of principles and virtues, which sparkles, crackles and thrills at certain periods. These bare feet, these naked arms, these rags, these shades of ignorance, these depths of abjectness, these abysses of gloom may be employed in the conquest of the ideal. Look through the medium of the people, and you shall discern the truth. This lowly sand which you trample beneath your feet, if you cast it into the furnace, and let it melt and seethe, shall become resplendent crystal, and by means of such as it a Galileo and a Newtown shall discover stars. ~ Victor Hugo

The physiological combustion theory takes as its starting point the fundamental principle that the amount of heat that arises from the combustion of a given substance is an invariable quantity-i.e., one independent of the circumstances accompanying the combustion-from which it is more specifically concluded that the chemical effect of the combustible materials undergoes no quantitative change even as a result of the vital process, or that the living organism, with all its mysteries and marvels, is not capable of generating heat out of nothing. ~ Robert Mayer

Our opposition will never understand the Democratic Party. Our Party is
to the unpracticed eyes of the old Republican Tories
a mysterious contraption that usually seems to be moving in a thousand directions. What they don't know is what hurts them. For all that movement in the Democratic Party is caused by the internal combustion of creative ferment, of ideas, of people vigorously committed to the proposition that change and social progress are not only to be desired; they are necessities of twentieth-century America. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

Once desire was turned on, combustion gave it a life of its own. Once it was turned on it became a raging wildfire, uncontrollable and uncontainable, the type of conflagration that had to be allowed to burn itself out. ~ Eric Jerome Dickey

It's pretty boring, working by yourself. The scene happens in between the two of you, and then you don't know what it's going to be because it's a kind of combustion. So, you do take something from every actor you work with. ~ Julianne Moore

The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes (omnes superfluitates comburit). But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion. ~ C.G. Jung

Within a decade, the internal combustion engine automobile is likely to look exactly like what it is - a machine that converts gasoline into much more heat than forward motion, a bizarre antiquity. ~ Stephen Petranek

So many of man's inventions - the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun - were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart. ~ Joe Hill

Theater is the crucible where we can create the dynamics of life without suffering the flames of their combustion. ~ Tom Althouse

Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong naming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition ; there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms. ~ John Milton

A Zendo is not a peaceful haven
but a furnace room for the combustion
of our egotistical delusions. ~ Eido Shimano Roshi

A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Prince, cast aside these Foreign Airs, which don't speak, 'cept to the Head," said I (without Thought, but only Combustion of the Tongue), crying, "Poor timid Creature, cast them aside, and instead play the Simple Things in your HEART!"
He replied, "What is in my Heart is not simple."
& I says, "Then you han't listened."
& He says, "I listen, & cannot understand its Speech."
& I says, "Then it ain't your Heart you hear."
"The Human Heart," recited he bitterly as if from some damp Lesson, "is a Muscle that operates through Constriction." His Work on the Oysters grew defiant. "I have seen a Heart lying on a Plate, jolted with Electricity. It had as much to say dead as alive."
Now I was terrified at his Past & his Secrets & I asked for no more Music. ~ M T Anderson

[R]epetition is as an essential element of language learning as a knife is to a lathe or fuel is to an internal combustion engine. ~ Kato Lomb

I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine. ~ Aneurin Bevan

The existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was physically possible and prompted efforts to build flying machines. Yet the first functioning airplanes did not flap their wings. The jury is out on whether machine intelligence will be like flight, which humans achieved through an artificial mechanism, or like combustion, which we initially mastered by copying naturally occurring fires. ~ Nick Bostrom

The battlefields of World War I established the importance of petroleum as an element of national power when the internal combustion machine overtook the horse and the coal-powered locomotive. ~ Daniel Yergin

We do a lot of science on the space station. Over the course of the year, there'll be 400 to 500 different investigations in all different kinds of disciplines. Some are related to improving life on earth in material science, physics, combustion science, earth sciences, medicine. ~ Scott Kelly

It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines. ~ Isaac Asimov

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty? ~ Mark Steyn

We are not going to move this world by criticism of it nor conformity to it, but by the combustion within it of lives ignited by the Spirit of God. ~ Vance Havner

I think the internal combustion engine will disappear from the streets of our cities in the next thirty years because transportation will be mass transportation, or probably electrical power. ~ Gaylord Nelson

He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. "Okay," she said, exhaling. "I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother, all right?" The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche...She focused her thoughts. "Sometimes," she decided to say, "wonderful things happen to me, too. ~ Salman Rushdie

The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men, and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. ~ Glenn Gould

Their love story: It's when logic fell in love with paranoia and paranoia learned to love logic; logic grounded paranoia and paranoia turned up the heat because logic never knew where that heat would come from. Logic needs to be stimulated and paranoia needs to be soothed and therefore they need each other, which resulted in the birth of combustion. The end. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

It can scarcely be denied that the fundamental phenomena which first led mankind into chemical inquiries are those of combustion. ~ William Crookes

Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn. ~ Mark Twain

We have a tremendous investment in facilities for (internal combustion engines, transmissions, and axles) and I can't see throwing them away just because the electric car doesn't emit fumes. ~ Henry Ford II

If I want a word, I make it. I don't like combustion. It's too quiet. I have some stuff in a state of combustication. ~ Julius Sumner Miller

If he was in danger of anything at all, it was spontaneous submissive combustion due to his master's teasing. ~ Kim Dare

Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is
a sort of spontaneous combustion
the oily rags of the head and heart. ~ Stanley Elkin

There was a study done in the early 20th century of all the entrepreneurs who entered the automobile industry around the same time as Henry Ford; there were something like 500 automotive companies that got funded, had the internal combustion engine, had the technology, and had the vision. Sixty percent of them folded within a couple of years. ~ Eric Ries

It was while I was seated in an easy-chair in the street the following evening, smoking, watching the combustion of this structure, that something was suddenly born in me, something out of Hell, and I smiled a smile that never man smiled. And I said: 'I will burn: I will return to London... ~ Matthew Phipps Shiel

It's the same way that when the car got going, people thought it would be an electric car, people thought it would be a steam car. Actually, the dark horse in that race was internal combustion, but because of the energy density of gasoline and discovery of oil in large amounts at that point in first Pennsylvania and then Texas, it won out over those other two, to the point that those other two are actually viewed as obscure footnotes in history. ~ Bill Gates

the ultimate Yoga which gives emancipation, which destroys the sense of separateness which is the root of Desire, is to be made by the concentration of every element of one's being, and annihilating it by intimate combustion with the universe itself. ~ Aleister Crowley

He leaves less than a foot of space between us and I'm 10 inches away from spontaneous combustion. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Stars are bright, hot, rotating masses of
gas which emit large quantities of light and heat as a result of nuclear
reactions. Most newly-forming large stars begin to collapse under the
weight of their own gravitational pull. That means that their centres are
hotter and denser. When the matter in the centre of the star is sufficiently
heated-when it reaches at least 10 million degrees Celsius (18
million degrees Fahrenheit)-nuclear reactions begin.56 What happens
inside a star is that with enormous energy (fusion), hydrogen turns into
helium. Nuclear fusion takes the particles that make up hydrogen and
sticks them together to make helium (1 helium atom is made from 4
hydrogen atoms). In order to make the protons and neutrons in the
helium stick together, the atom gives off tremendous energy. The energy
released in the process is radiated from the surface of the star as light
and heat. When the hydrogen is consumed, the star then begins to burn
with helium, in exactly the same way, and heavier elements are formed.
These reactions continue until the mass of the star has been consumed.
However, since oxygen is not used in these reactions inside stars,
the result is not ordinary combustion, such as that takes place when
burning a piece of wood. The combustion seen as giant flames in stars
does not actually derive from fire. Indeed, burning of just this kind is
described in the verse ~ Harun Yahya

It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse. ~ Winston Churchill

unlike, say, the sun, or the rainbow, or earthquakes, the fascinating world of the very small never came to the notice of primitive peoples. if you think about this for a minute, it's not really surprising.. they had no way of even knowing it was there, and so of course they didn't invent any myths to explain it. it wasn't until the microscope was invented in the sixteenth century that people discovered that ponds and lakes, soil and dust, even our body, teem with tiny living creatures, too small to see, yet too complicated and, in their own way, beautiful, or perhaps frightening, depending on how you think about them.

the whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye - and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all knowing god, mentions them at all. in fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. they don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or nuclear fusion, or electricity, or anaesthetics. in fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive people who first started telling them. if these 'holly books' really were written, or dictated, ~ Richard Dawkins

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination. ~ Michael Leunig

Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration. ~ Gregory Benford

Everybody thinks an automobile needs an engine. Well, an automobile doesn't necessarily need an engine. What we do is shift electric motors into the wheels of our automobiles and so we have a completely different kind of thing where we have four independent intelligent wheels rather than a traditional internal combustion engine and power train and so on. ~ William J. Mitchell

If three hundred years of chainsaws, CFCs, depleted uranium, automobiles, genetic engineering, airplanes, routine international trade, computers, plastics, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, vivisection, internal combustion engines, feller bunchers, dragline excavators, televisions, cell phones, and nuclear (and conventional) bombs are not enough to convey the picture, then that picture will never be conveyed. ~ Derrick Jensen

And the flames are every colour of the rainbow."
"They can't be," observed Daffy.
"Well, they are," she said cheekily. "Have you been there, that you know so much about it?"
"No," said Daffy, very calm, "but I'd wager I know more than you about the chemical processes of combustion."
Mary rolled her eyes. Did he hope to dazzle her with syllables? ~ Emma Donoghue

Their sudden intimacy was like the explosive combustion that engulfs and consumes a moth that has fluttered too close to a candle flame; a completely unexpected turn of events that took both of them unawares and swept them irresistibly up and out of themselves as it hurled them into each other's arms. ~ Jack Whyte

Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable ... Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely ... So important does nature regard this unseen combustion ... that a starving man's brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed. ~ Loren Eiseley

The foodstuff, carbohydrate, is essentially a packet of hydrogen, a hydrogen supplier, a hydrogen donor, and the main event during its combustion is the splitting off of hydrogen. ~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Flash fire."
She turned her head as far as she could, trying to look at him. "I don't know what that means."
He shifted on the branch. "First time I was on a submarine, we had a flash fire. It's a combustion explosion. A flammable mist builds up in the air, then suddenly, bam. Think super high temperatures and a rapidly moving flame front. It kills by asphyxiation. Burns up all the available oxygen. It's devastating. ~ Dana Marton

Success is not due to spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire. ~ Various Attributed Sources

This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. ~ Edward Bellamy

Think about it, Lee - we already know that intelligent minds produce finely tuned devices. Look at the space shuttle. Look at a television set. Look at an internal combustion engine. We see minds producing complex, precision machinery all the time.

So the existence of a supermind - or God - as the explanation for the fine - tuning of the universe makes all sense in the world. ~ Lee Strobel

Shakespeare doesn't belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now. It's like coal. The only meaningfulness of a piece of coal starts and finishes with its combustion, giving us light and heat. And that to me is Shakespeare. ~ Peter Brook

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened. ~ Jeffrey Deitch

Fear is like the steam that fires the combustion engine. You need fear to get a performance going. ~ Rachel Weisz

Arson is a respected profession among certain subcultures in Jersey, and the good ones don't get caught. The good ones channel lightning and mysterious acts of spontaneous combustion. ~ Janet Evanovich

Fulfilling the four needs [spiritual, mental, physical, social] in an integrated way is like combining elements in chemistry. When we reach a "critical mass" of integration, we experience spontaneous combustion-an explosion of inner synergy that ignites the fire within and gives vision, passion, and a spirit of adventure to life. ~ Stephen Covey

The sidewalks were haunted by dust
ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up,
swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice on
the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strol-
lers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a
volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes every-
where, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable
dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spon-
taneous combustion at three in the morning.

Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element for
element. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with no
sound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep
over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serene
vapors. Tar was poured licorice in the streets, red bricks were
brass and gold, roof tops were paved with bronze. The high-
tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threat
above the unslept houses.
The cicadas sang louder and yet louder.
The sun did not rise, it overflowed. ~ Ray Bradbury

The process of history is combustion. ~ Novalis

Jeff opened blue eyes, grinned at me. "If you're feeling left out ... " I almost threw out an instinctive no, but I decided to throw him a bone. "Oh, Jeff. It'd be too good - you and me. Too powerful, too much emotion, too much heat. We'd come together and boom" - I clapped my hands together - "like a moth to a flame, there'd be nothing left." His eyes glazed over. "Combustion?" "Totally." He was quiet for a moment, his index finger tracing a pattern on the knee of his jeans. Then he nodded. "Too powerful. It'd destroy us both." I nodded solemnly. "Probably so." But I leaned over, pressed my lips to his forehead. "We'll always have Chicago." "Chicago," he dreamily repeated. "Yeah. Definitely." He cleared his throat, seemed to regain a little composure. "When I tell this story later, you kissed me on the mouth. With tongue. And you were handsy." I chuckled. "Fair enough. ~ Chloe Neill

About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I have established by experiments, that I regard as decisive, has led me to think that what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain in weight by combustion and calcination; and I am persuaded that the increase in weight of metallic calyxes is due to the same cause ... This discovery seems to me one of the most interesting that has been made since Stahl and since it is difficult not to disclose something inadvertently in conversation with friends that could lead to the truth I have thought it necessary to make the present deposit to the Secretary of the Academy to await the time I make my experiments public. ~ Antoine Lavoisier

The trick is to think of life as a process rather than a substance. When a candle is burning, there is a flame that clearly carries energy. When we put the candle out, the energy doesn't "go" anywhere. The candle still contains energy in its atoms and molecules. What happens, instead, is that the process of combustion has ceased. Life is like that: it's not "stuff"; it's a set of things happening. When that process stops, life ends. ~ Sean Carroll