Iron, after it is converted into gold by the touch of philosopher's stone, may be kept under the ground or thrown into a rubbish heap; it will always remain gold and will not return to its former condition. Similar is the state of the man whose soul has touched, even once, the feet of the Almighty Lord. Whether he dwells in the bustle of the world, or in the solitude of the forest, nothing ever contaminates him.
--
As quoted in Hindu Psychology : Its Meaning for the West (1946) by Swami Akhilananda, p. 204Ramakrishna
Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold…
Neal Stephenson
When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain...Robinson Jeffers
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day and wish’t were done.
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern.Matthew Arnold
Content is the Philosopher’s Stone, that turns all it touches into Gold.
Thomas (writer) Fuller
(On being prepped for a gig supported by the bank, UBS) She told me not to mention Nazi Gold, and of course if you tell a comedian not to do something, they'll immediately go and do it. So I went out on stage on a giant, neon Swastika, and sang "Gold, gold/always believe in your soul/you're indestructible-like the Third Reich!""
Bill Bailey
Ramakrishna
Raman, Varadaraja V.
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