“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.”
Opus Posthumous (1955)
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Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955Related quotes
“If I had caused the cloud, it was my duty to make an effort to dispel it.”
Source: Wuthering Heights
"Babette's Feast"
Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)
Context: When later in life they thought of this evening it never occurred to any of them that they might have been exalted by their own merit. They realized that the infinite grace of which General Loewenhielm had spoken had been allotted to them, and they did not even wonder at the fact, for it had been but the fulfillment of an ever-present hope. The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium.
Summary of Freud's view found in Karen Armstrong's 'A History of God' (1993), p. 409
Misattributed
“The god of war has gone over to the other side.”
Statement to Alfred Jodl, after losses in the Battle of Stalingrad, as quoted in The Second World War: An Illustrated History (1979) by A. J. P. Taylor
Other remarks
Source: The Infinite Future (2018), Part 1: Translator’s Note to the Reader by Daniel Laszlo, Chapter 16 (p. 188)
Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 169
Context: This māyā, that is to say, the ego, is like a cloud. The sun cannot be seen on account of a thin patch of cloud; when that disappears one sees the sun. If by the grace of the guru one's ego vanishes, then one sees God.