Life & Wisdom Quote by Izaak Walton

Walton’s line lands like a calm rebuke dressed as a proverb: language is human-made, but reality answers to a higher authority. Calling words “men’s daughters” feminizes and domesticates speech in a way that fits a 17th-century writer steeped in patriarchal metaphor: words are born from us, nurtured, married off into public life, and can be lovely, ornamental, even persuasive. They also imply lineage and reputational risk; what you say reflects back on you, and it can be disowned, embellished, or misunderstood.

Then Walton flips the hierarchy. “God’s sons are things” gives the material world a sterner, inheriting power. Things are not just more “real” than words; they’re portrayed as legitimate heirs of creation, carrying authority, consequence, and permanence. In an England marked by religious contention and a growing empirical temper (Bacon’s shadow, the early Royal Society vibe), the sentence quietly sides with the tangible: deeds over rhetoric, observation over disputation, lived piety over theological hair-splitting.

The craftsmanship is in the grammar’s imbalance. “Words are…” is soft, social, human. “But… things” is blunt, almost prosecutorial. Walton is warning against the easy prestige of eloquence - the sermon, the pamphlet, the clever argument - warning that it’s all second-order. The subtext is moral as much as epistemic: don’t confuse the performance of virtue for virtue itself; don’t let verbal ingenuity outrun accountability. In Walton’s world, God doesn’t grade your rhetoric. He counts what you do.