Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent† Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment: cheerfulness keeps up a kind of day-light in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

-Addison,Joseph
  In The Spectator, no.381,17 May.

And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.

-Bible (NewTestament)
St Luke10:18.

As different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

-Bronte«  , EmilyJane
  Wuthering Heights, ch.9.

His love was passion's essence:öas a tree On fire by lightning, with ethereal flame Kindled he was, and blasted.

-Rochdale
^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 3, stanza 78.

Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

-Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
  Of Edmund Kean. Table Talk (published1835), entry for 27  Apr.

Tempt me no more; for I Have known the lightning's hour, The poet's inward pride, The certainty of power.

-Day-Lewis, Cecil
  The Magnetic Mountain, pt.3, no.24.

L'amour, croyait-elle, devait arriver tout a'   coup, avec de grands e¤  clats et des fulgurations. She believed that love should appear instantaneously, with the brilliance of a lightning storm.

-Flaubert, Gustave
  Madame Bovary, pt.1, ch.8.

I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror,O Christ,O God.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
  'The Wreck of the Deutschland', pt.1, stanza 2.

   Mine eyeshave seen thegloryof the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fatal lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

-Howe,JuliaWard
  'Battle Hymn of the Republic'.

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

-Jarrell, Randall
  Poetry and the Age,'The Obscurity of the Poet'.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

-Kesey, Ken Elton
Quoted in Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool- Aid  Acid Test (1968), ch.1.

Lightning rods have had it better than Nancy Reagan.

-NewYorkTimes
  On the publication of Kitty Kelley's unauthorized biography Nancy Reagan.'Scratching at the Teflon', editorial,10 Apr.

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion† I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of that seeming bang and flash, I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentallyand shot me.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  Of his wounding during the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia, ch.12.

Wir tappen im Labyrinth unsers Lebenswandels und im Dunkel unserer Forschungen umher: helleAugenblicke erleuchten dabei wie Blitze unsernWeg. We grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lightning.

-Schopenhauer, Arthur
  DieWelt alsWille undVorstellung (TheWorld asWill and Representation), vol.2, ch.15 (translated by E F J Payne).

I asked you to be the thunder and lightning of Desert Storm.You were all of that and more.

-Schwarzkopf, H Norman
  Message to US units on the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War.

In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun O'er which clouds are brightening, Thou dost float and run Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  'To a Skylark', stanza 3.

It came by a lightning flash like knowledge from the gods.

-Wilson, Edward O(sborne)
  On the1953 discovery of the DNA molecule. Sociobiology.