I have a cold coal to blow at. [ Proverb ]
Wood half-coal is easily kindled. [ Proverb ]
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But, though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives. [ George Herbert ]
With eyes that looked into the very soul -
Bright - and as black and burning as a coal. [ Byron ]
If by fire of sooty coal the empiric alchymist
Can turn, or holds it possible to turn,
Metals of drossest ore to perfect gold. [ Milton ]
He touches it as warily as a cat does a coal of fire. [ Proverb ]
The poor man's penny unjustly detained, is a coal of fire in a rich man's purse. [ Proverb ]
Affection is a coal that must be cooled: Else, suffered, it will set the heart on fire. [ William Shakespeare ]
There is no such thing as a white lie; a lie is as black as a coal-pit, and twice as foul. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
It is a coal from God's altar must kindle our fire; and without fire, true fire, no acceptable sacrifice. [ William Penn ]
He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar who in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings, and endurances of a brother man. [ Carlyle ]
There is a hand that has no heart in it, there is a claw or paw, a flipper or fin, a bit of wet cloth to take hold of, a piece of unbaked dough on the cook's trencher, a cold clammy thing we recoil from, or greedy clutch with the heat of sin, which we drop as a burning coal. What a scale from the talon to the horn of plenty, is this human palmleaf! Sometimes it is what a knifeshaped, thin-bladed tool we dare not grasp, or like a poisonous thing we shake off, or unclean member, which, white as it may look, we feel polluted by! [ C. A. Bartol ]
All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent. [ Emerson ]