— Gospel of Mark 8:36, King James Version
About this quote
हिन्दी में
मनुष्य को क्या लाभ, यदि वह सारा संसार पा ले और अपनी आत्मा गँवा दे?
What it means
The sentence is built out of commercial vocabulary — profit, gain, loss — and posed as a question with the arithmetic left to the hearer. It does not condemn gain. It accepts the whole world as the figure on one side of the ledger and asks what the net comes to once the other entry is made.
The verb in the second half repays attention: the soul is not sold or traded, it is suffered to be lost. The loss arrives as a consequence of the gaining rather than as a price knowingly agreed to. Read as a sermon against wealth, the line goes blunt; read as an accounting question, it is aimed at anyone who is winning and has not recently checked what the winning is costing.
What it teaches you
The practical force sits in that word suffer: nobody schedules the trade, so the only way to catch it is to audit the side of the ledger that has no number on it. If your year is summed up by revenue, rank or followers, write down alongside it what moved in the same period with no metric attached — what you have decided to keep quiet about, whose calls you stopped returning. The line asks for that second column, not for less ambition.
अर्थ और सीख
यह वाक्य व्यापार की भाषा में पूछा गया सवाल है — लाभ, प्राप्ति, हानि — और हिसाब सुनने वाले पर छोड़ दिया गया है। यह कमाई की निंदा नहीं करता; यह पूरी दुनिया को एक पलड़े में रखकर पूछता है कि दूसरे पलड़े का नुक़सान जोड़ने के बाद शुद्ध लाभ क्या बचा। ध्यान दीजिए कि आत्मा बेची नहीं जाती, ‘गँवाई’ जाती है — यानी सौदा कभी तय होकर नहीं होता, इसलिए जो चीज़ गिनी नहीं जा रही, उसका हिसाब जान-बूझकर लगाना पड़ता है।
Where it comes from
The Gospel of Mark 8:36, in the King James Version — among the most quoted sentences of the New Testament, spoken by Jesus after telling his disciples that whoever would save their life will lose it.
