Love Quote by John Burroughs

Burroughs writes like a man watching America slide into the Gilded Age’s glittering confidence and deciding to drag the conversation back to bedrock. The sentence is built as a rebuke to shortcuts: not just laziness, but the entire fantasy that value can be conjured by clever instruments - “paper currency” and “promises to pay” standing in for speculation, status, and any moral IOU that never gets cashed. He turns economics into ethics, then flips the terms: the only stable “gold” is “real service.”

The craft here is the piling up of costs that sound almost old-fashioned in their plainness: work, patience, love, self-sacrifice. Burroughs isn’t romanticizing suffering; he’s naming the invisible labor that actually produces durable things - relationships, character, community, meaningful craft. The list moves from the measurable (work, patience) into the intimate (love) and finally the bruising (self-sacrifice), implying that the highest goods demand not just effort but surrender of ego.

Subtext: he’s suspicious of modernity’s habit of abstracting responsibility. Money and promises let you postpone accountability, outsource the mess, claim credit without contact. “Real service” insists on proximity: you show up, you give something of yourself, you can’t fake it for long.

As an author-nature essayist, Burroughs also borrows nature’s tempo. The line argues against the industrial impatience of his era: you can’t rush a harvest, and you can’t hustle your way into a life that holds. The moral is stern, but it’s also oddly liberating - it tells you exactly where value comes from, and it isn’t the marketplace’s applause.