We are beginning to see that money, after all, is not the main thing. The real values cannot be bought and sold.
Interpretation
Money is not the most important aspect of life; true value lies in intangible qualities.
In this quote, John Burroughs emphasizes the idea that material wealth does not equate to true worth or happiness. He argues that the most valuable aspects of life, such as love, friendship, and personal fulfillment, cannot be purchased with money, highlighting the importance of prioritizing these intangible values over financial pursuits.
In practice
During a financial literacy workshop, one might say this quote to shift the focus to the importance of relationships.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are in turn shaped by it is a key theme in my fiction - indeed, it's a key part of a great deal of science fiction.
Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
I think when I first started, I tried to make believe I was in the ballpark, sitting next to somebody and just talking. And if you go to a ballgame, and you sit there, you're not going to talk pitches for three hours.
The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.
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