Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

The saying uses a simple physical analogy—fire as the enabling condition for a candle’s flame—to argue that human life likewise depends on an inner dimension often labeled “spiritual.” Read in a broadly Buddhist key, it can be taken to mean that mere biological existence is incomplete without cultivation of mind and conduct: ethical discipline, meditation, and wisdom that orient life toward awakening and liberation from suffering. The comparison stresses dependence and necessity rather than ornament: spirituality is not an optional add-on but the condition that makes a fully “alive” human life possible, just as fire makes a candle actually burn.