“Antisthenes used to say that envious people were devoured by their own disposition, just as iron is by rust.”

“These hearts rust just as iron rusts; and indeed they are polished through the recitation of the Qur’an.”

“Just as iron rusts unless it is used, and water putrifies or, in cold, turns to ice, so our intellect spoils unless it is kept in use.”

“Lies are rust on iron. A blemish on power.”

“If gold rusts, what then can iron do?”

“Nothing can destroy iron, only its own rust can. Likewise, nothing can destroy you, only your own mindset can.”

“… if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust….”

“Reader, pray that soon this Iron Age
Will crumble, and Beauty escape the rusting cage.”

“Antisthenes … used to say that the wise man would regulate his conduct as a citizen, not according to the established laws of the state, but according to the law of virtue.”

“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…”