“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Section 1, paragraph 18, lines 12-14.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Karl Marx 290
German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and … 1818–1883Related quotes

“They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.”
Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 69, Farewell to Nemi
Context: In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and the clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.

Quote from Gainsborough's letter to his friend William Jackson of Exeter, from Bath, 2 Sept. 1768; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 384 (Appendix A - Letter VII)
1755 - 1769

Julian and the Antiochians http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=107&cat=1
Collected Poems (1992)

I. H. Bromley, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).