Fires Of Refinement Quotes

Though the fire and water tried to overtake me, I have come out to a place of great abundance. I know that the fires of refinement, although hard, dark, and difficult, brought me to a better and richer place in God. ~ Robin Bertram

The fires of refinement will shine the light of Christ into the dark places of our hearts, burn off the chaff, and restore us to a state of greater purity. ~ Robin Bertram

Trials come. Tribulation comes. Fires of refinement come. The purpose of refinement is to bring to light the things hidden in darkness and then remove them ~ Robin Bertram

The fires of refinement come with a cost, but also with a promise. His grace has been extended forth to you for restoration, confirmation, strengthening, and being established in Him. ~ Robin Bertram

True love is like a metal tested in a fire. Fires of adversity surround us daily. Are we to love only when it is merely convenient? Like gold or silver, which very hot fire must heat to purge them of impurities, love must be thrust into the fire from time to time to make it purer, stronger and more resilient. And in the same way, live shines its brightest right out of the flames. ~ James Michael Pratt

New Rule: Republicans must stop pitting the American people against the government. Last week, we heard a speech from Republican leader Bobby Jindal--and he began it with the story that every immigrant tells about going to an American grocery store for the first time and being overwhelmed with the "endless variety on the shelves." And this was just a 7-Eleven--wait till he sees a Safeway. The thing is, that "endless variety"exists only because Americans pay taxes to a government, which maintains roads, irrigates fields, oversees the electrical grid, and everything else that enables the modern American supermarket to carry forty-seven varieties of frozen breakfast pastry.Of course, it's easy to tear government down--Ronald Reagan used to say the nine most terrifying words in the Englishlanguage were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." But that was before "I'm Sarah Palin, now show me the launch codes."The stimulus package was attacked as typical "tax and spend"--like repairing bridges is left-wing stuff. "There the liberals go again, always wanting to get across the river." Folks, the people are the government--the first responders who put out fires--that's your government. The ranger who shoos pedophiles out of the park restroom, the postman who delivers your porn.How stupid is it when people say, "That's all we need: the federal government telling Detroit how to make cars or Wells Fargo how to run a bank. You want them to look like the post office?"You mean the p ~ Bill Maher

There were rockets like a flock of scintillating birds singing with sweet voices. There were green trees with trunks of dark smoke: their leaves opened like a whole spring unfolding in a moment, and their shining branches dropped glowing flowers down upon the hobbits, disappearing with a sweet scent just before their touched their upturned faces. There were fountains of butterflies that flew glittering into the trees; there were pillars of coloured fires that rose and turned into eagles, or sailing ships, or a phalanx of flying swans; there was a red thunderstorm and a shower of yellow rain; there was a forest of silver spears that sprang suddenly into the air with a yell like an embattled army, and and came down again into the Water with a hiss like a hundred hot snakes. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Are you aware of who you really are in relationship to the very God who created the Universe, who scattered the stars and aligned the planets? Only to those who remember and realize that they are literally spirit children of a God who knows and loves them, can the fire of refinement be welcome. Otherwise, pain and adversity are just that, pain and adversity. Fire doesn't purify; it only burns. ~ Toni Sorenson

Rawness and refinement are not opposite ends of a luxurious spectrum ... they are two complementary features with which to populate a luxe environment. ~ Kelly Wearstler

Once you've been loved by a man like Damian, once you've been branded and molded in the fires of that possession, you will never be moved by tepid, impostor kisses. ~ Leylah Attar

The pressure of his mouth eased. He drew away, holding her at arm's length. He filled her vision, broad shoulders and shaggy head framed by the crags and cliffs of Connemara. He had a look of astonished delight on his face, while dangerous banked fires smoldered in his eyes. Still gripping her shoulders, he stepped back and said, "Look me in the eye, Caitlin MacBride, and tell me you've been kissed before. ~ Susan Wiggs

Well my gun fires seven different shades of shit, so what's your favorite color, punk? ~ Gerard Way

I suppose by most girls' standards, Armand is hot. But he shops more than a woman. I'm sure those are not the right words. Note to self: I must think of more masculine ways to describe Armand. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Living is the refinement of an imperfect model. ~ Omar ZahZah

How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all. ~ Saul Bellow

Please guide this ship away from harm and make her safe - keep her warm...
Attention and lust all she desires - and the time it takes to stoke those fires
You may invite her to your lair with sensuousness and a passionate flair
her draw irresistible, hunger insatiable - your thoughts no more your own

For she has taken place there, in you, the queen upon her throne.....

Sensual bliss one of many rewards, but stolen heart and pointy swords
Your skills and gift of most import, for when they wane, pain, and love's cut short....
May crack your inner strength some day and truly steal your time (heart) away....
For a muse but one of intermittent bliss starting from the first kiss
And ending only when she's done - then you're left alone as one..... ~ Lady Blossom

The zenith of elegance in any woman's wardrobe is the little black dress, the power of which suggests dash and refinement. ~ Andre Leon Talley

The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. ~ Lorrie Moore

Some of the choicest blessings of my life have been the close friendships I have experienced over the years. Often, these friendships have been forged in the fires of shared experience. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

But already his mind was racing ahead to his next encounter with humans. There was, he knew, a small encampment of Bedouin nearby. He'd spied their sheep-flocks and their fires from a distance, their men traveling on horseback, but until now he'd avoided them. He wondered, how did their lives differ from those of the caravan-men? Perhaps, instead of finding another caravan to follow, he would turn his wanderings toward their encampment. But should he remain content with observing them from a distance, when a much more intimate option lay available to him? ~ Helene Wecker

About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sudden glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Think of the enormous leisure of God! He is never in a hurry. We are always in such a frantic hurry. In the light of the glory of the vision we go forth to do things, but the vision is not real in us yet; and God has to take us into the valley, and put us through fires and floods to batter us into shape, until we get to the place where He can trust us ... Let Him put you on His wheel and whirl you as He likes, and as sure as God is God and you are you, you will turn out exactly in accordance with the vision. Don't lose heart in the process. ~ Oswald Chambers

False modesty is the refinement of vanity. It is a lie. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

It was the end of the era of the amateur, a time when everyone had to be a bit of everything. You helped your neighbors build their homes, fight their fires, raise and butcher and preserve their own food. You knew how to repair a weapon, pull a tooth, hammer a horseshoe, and deliver a child. But industrialization fostered specialization - and it was fantastic. Trained pros were better than self-taught amateurs, and their expertise allowed them to demand and develop better tools for their crafts - tools that only they knew how to operate. Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched. ~ Christopher McDougall

Nothing is really lost or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form
no object of the world,
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing ...
The body, sluggish, aged , cold
the embers
left from early fires,
... shall duly flame again ~ Nicholas Sparks

The greatest and the hottest fires that ever were on earth are but ice in comparison to the fire of hell. ~ Thomas Brooks

I'm so not interesting in having to try and make something out of foil."
What, you didn't like the poncho with wraparound leggings?"
It was beyond hideou- wait a minute. You watch that show?"
My mom loves it."
But your suppose to be sulking in the basement getting ready to light fires."
What can I say? I'm a failure as a teenager. I watch TV with my mom. ~ Elizabeth Scott

To know joy one must go much deeper. Joy is not mere sensation. It requires extraordinary refinement of the mind, but not the refinement of the self that gathers more and more to itself. Such a self, such a man, can never understand this state of joy in which the enjoyer is not. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Our job is to create a more perfect union. Right here. Right now! This has always been the dream of humankind since the beginning and once it was a reality and people around the world would speak about it to one another in quiet whispers over late night fires and it was called…AMERICA! ~ Jann Burner

Concealed within the stones are frozen fires. Borne on vast waves of polychrome gas that attracted, discarded, formed, and reformed patterns of infinite complexity, the living sparks had taken their allotted places. They were burning before the beginning. They will burn after the end. Their fire is impervious to time. Time is a human concept. Creation is on a different scale. Every spark was a syllable spoken into silence, a miniscule portion of the great Word that became a roar of limitless power and exploded to create a universe. From chaos, cosmos. ~ Morgan Llywelyn

It is with books as with the fires of our grates, everybody borrows a light from his neighbor to kindle his own, which in turn is communicated to others, and each partakes of all. ~ Voltaire

The heart fires off warning flares when something's not right - and hell if they aren't exploding in mine right now - but how the fuck do I stop wanting someone I know was made for me?
The answer's a clear-cut, jagged piece of glass. One I'm sure is gonna bleed me the fuck out at the end . . .
I can't. ~ Gail McHugh

The National Guard has served America as both a wartime force and the first military responders in times of domestic crisis. Hundreds of times each year, the nation's governors call upon their Guard troops to respond to fires, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. ~ Russel Honore

You are a man without a heart, Dr. Leddell.
And you, Mary Cooper, are a meddler. A woman can be forgiven for many transgressions but not that.
I have been called worse. And by people I hold in more esteem than you.
Ha! I pity the poor man unfortunate enough to marry you someday. He writes his own ticket to hell.
If he does, then I'll make that hell as pleasant a place for him as I know how. But I won't deceive him and tell him it's heaven, then stoke the fires behind his back and cover it all with the scent of lilacs. ~ Ann Rinaldi

We are imperfect creatures created with egotistical defects, insecurities and an incomprehensible desire for perfection and the excessive use of social media feeds the raging fires within, most of the time adding salt to wounds we never knew existed and at times creating new ones. ~ Aysha Taryam

Lots of firemen got their start setting fires. They learn to set them, then they learn to put them out. Tom ~ Ann Patchett

A man doesn't have to be alive to start the fires of revolution. ~ Karen Hancock

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis.

In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness.

Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution.

We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised ~ John F. Kennedy

You wonder why I'm constantly aroused, and I guess I'm telling you. Your body fires me. Your fingertips brushing over my skin, ignites me. Your breath washing over me, enflames me. Everything about you is sensual, and you have no idea ... none. When you stare at me with those smoky eyes, undressing me like I undress you, all of the blood rushes down, and I want you ... so bad. I'm pretty sure that wherever I am right now, I have an ache, a hard, nearly painful ache ... because I'm thinking of you. Letter from Kellan to Kiera. ~ S.C. Stephens

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride ~ William H. Gass

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants. ~ Robert Andrews Millikan

A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Most fires made by underestimated sparks, the greatness fire inside ourselves is lit by the spark of the change, came across a small corner in our souls where the conscience still whispering. ~ Ammar Moussa

Contraception leads to more babies being born out of wedlock, like fire extinguishers lead to more fires. ~ Stephen Colbert