Fire in the heart sends smoke into the head.

The proverb links intense feeling (“fire in the heart”) with impaired judgment (“smoke into the head”). It suggests that strong passions—love, anger, jealousy, ambition—can cloud the mind the way smoke obscures vision, leading to confusion, rash decisions, or self-deception. The image also implies a causal chain: what begins as an inner heat (emotion) produces an outward mental haze (distorted thinking). As a piece of folk wisdom, it functions as a warning to pause and cool down before acting, and as a diagnosis of why people sometimes behave irrationally when emotionally inflamed.