Life & Wisdom Quote by John Burroughs

Burroughs is doing what he often does best: turning a small, workmanlike image into a quiet argument about character. Nails are useful, common, and - crucially - made to be pulled. A nail holds until it doesn’t; it yields to the right pressure, the right leverage, the right persuader. By contrast, a rivet is designed for permanence. It’s not just hard to remove; it’s not meant to come out without damage to the structure around it. That contrast turns a homely hardware-store comparison into a miniature taxonomy of human malleability.

The intent isn’t to romanticize stubbornness so much as to classify social reality. Burroughs, a naturalist-essayist writing in a late-19th-century America obsessed with progress, reform, and self-improvement, is skeptical of the era’s faith that people can be reliably "fixed" with the correct moral tool. Some personalities - the agreeable, the anxious, the socially compliant - can be "drawn" from positions, promises, loyalties. Others are riveted in: their convictions, habits, or identities are fused to the frameworks they inhabit.

The subtext lands with a faint warning. If you mistake a rivet for a nail, you waste your strength and risk bending the whole project: family, politics, institutions. Burroughs also smuggles in a realist’s comfort: permanence exists. Not everyone is persuadable, not everyone should be, and the world is partly held together by those who don’t come loose.