Date: 360 B.C.

"For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: March 24, 1659

"[Oliver Cromwell's] temper exceeding fiery, as I have known, but the flame of it kept down, for the most part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments he had."

— Maidston, John

Date: 1688

"Sole Queen of my affections and desire, / That like to Ætna sets my heart on fire,"

— Scot, Walter (b. 1613, d. in or after 1688)

Date: 1697

The soul may be a "Modification or Power of the Body" so that it eventually ceases to act, "either perishing, as a Flame when the Fewel is spent; or returning to its Fountain, whatsoever it was"

— Burnet, Thomas (c.1635-1715)

Date: 1697

"If a Flame be extinct, the same cannot return, but a new one may be made."

— Burnet, Thomas (c.1635-1715)

Date: 1704

"Remark your commonest pretender to a light within, how dark, and dirty, and gloomy he is without; as lanterns which, the more light they bear in their bodies, cast out so much the more soot and smoke and fuliginous matter to adhere to the sides."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1708, 1714

"For otherwise, the Pannick may have been caught; the Evidence of the Senses lost, as in a Dream; and the Imagination so inflam'd, as in a moment to have burnt up every Particle of Judgment and Reason. The combustible Matters lie prepar'd within, and ready to take fire at a Spark; but chiefly in ...

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1721, 1722

"Nature, industriously favourable to men, hath not bounded itself in giving desires to men, she was willing that we should have them too, and that we should be the animated instruments of their felicity: she hath put in us the flame of the passions, to make them live easy."

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Date: 1721, 1722

"I think myself almost annihilated; and I do not become sensible of my existence, till a dismal jealousy comes to kindle and produce in my heart, fear, suspicions, hatred and regret."

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Date: 1732

"Thus from your eyes united beams conspire, / To kindle in our souls a pleasing fire;"

— Dodsley, Robert (1703-1764)