If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.

—Charles Dickens, 1865

There’s plenty of fire in the coldest flint!

—Rachel Field, 1939

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

—Simone Weil, c. 1940

Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851

If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.

—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.

—Lewis Strauss, 1954

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.

—William James, 1902

Oil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.

—Peter Hitchcock, 2010

At the start there’s always energy.

—Suzan-Lori Parks, 2006

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.

—Lorraine Hansberry, 1965

I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”

—Michel Serres, 1982

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

—Susanne K. Langer, 1942

The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

—Bertrand Russell, 1938

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

—Walter Pater, 1873

Will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.

—Isadora Duncan, c. 1902

What is life but organized energy?

—Arthur C. Clarke, 1958

A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys.

—Saul Bellow, 1989

Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

—George Gershwin, 1933

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

—Germaine Greer, 1970

Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

—John Morley, 1872

The brightest light burns the quickest.

—Olive Beatrice Muir, 1900