When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.

The metaphor contrasts the sun—singular, life-giving, and irreplaceable—with a candle—small, provisional, and inadequate. It suggests that some losses cannot be compensated for by substitutes: after something fundamental is gone (a person, an era, a love, a vocation), lesser replacements may offer temporary light but cannot restore what was lost. The phrasing also implies a hierarchy of value and scale: consolation is possible, but it is not equivalence. Read psychologically, it captures grief’s realism; read morally, it warns against self-deception in thinking that a token remedy can stand in for a profound good.