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.
The irony of New Testament lordship is that only in slavery to Christ can a man discover authentic freedom.
To say that subjects in general are not proper judges (of the law) when their governors oppress them and play the tyrant, and when they defend their rights ...is as great a treason as ever a man uttered.
The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears.
The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out.
Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week.
All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
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