Talent (currency)

“ WHO SHALL ESTIMATE THE COST.—Who shall estimate the cost of a priceless reputation—that impress which gives this human dross its currency—without which we stand despised, debased, depreciated? Who shall repair it injured? Who can redeem it lost? Oh, well and truly does the great philosopher of poetry esteem the world's wealth as "trash" in the comparison. Without it gold has no value ”

“ A hundred thousand talents of gold - A talent of gold weighed three thousand shekels, and was worth five thousand and seventy-five pounds, fifteen shillings, and seven pence half-penny. One hundred thousand such talents would therefore amount to five hundred and seven millions, five hundred and seventy-eight thousand, one hundred and twenty-five pounds sterling. ”

“ If you adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money. What you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry, is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output. Nor have you the right to look for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade, lies your reward; the work is here the wages. It will be seen I have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist class. ”

“ It doesn't take many such "new points" to make a dollar's worth.
There is no use applying for a situation if you cannot do anything. Encourage and develop some one talent for the use of which the world offers a money value. ”

“ A Talent in our Lord's time was a piece of money of great value, of about £342, and in the story which Jesus told the disciples, a Talent was described as something precious which was given to the servants of a great lord, to trade with, while he was on a long journey. ”

“ Beauty, we say, is given by God—it is a talent; strength is given by God—it is a talent; position is given by God—it is a talent; but money is proper wages for our day's work—it is not a talent, it is a due. We may justly spend it on ourselves, if we have worked for it.
117. And there would be some shadow of excuse for this, were it not that the very power of making the money is itself only one of the applications of that intellect or strength which we confess to be talents. Why is one man richer than another? ”

“ A modern drawing of average merit, or a first-class engraving, may, perhaps, not without some self-reproach, be purchased out of his savings by a man of narrow income; but a satisfactory example of first-rate art—masterhands' work—is wholly out of his reach. ”

“ Furniss, and the Chaucer of Professor Skeat, we have typical examples of services not enjoyed by any former age. To-day the supreme poets, seers and sages of all time are set before us in the clearest sunshine; their gold, refined from all admixture, is minted for a currency impossible before. ”

“ At first the thought of the great stake for which she was playing in terms of currency, with the head of Jim’s father on every note, was much with her. The amazing nature of the offer of five millions of dollars stimulated her imagination, roused her; gold coins are counters in the game of success, signs and tokens. Money alone could not have lured her ”

“ And not only will larger wealth be yet more freely poured out on artistic adornment, but such use of money will be regarded as the best to which it can be applied. For though gold is not beautiful it can make beauty, even that beauty which elevates and ennobles, which purifies the mind and inspires the soul. ”

“ If the piece of work which he had to deliver up was something of more than ordinary importance, especially anything of great value, worth many thousands owing to the costliness of the jewels or the extreme delicacy of the gold-work, he was capable of running about like a madman, cursing himself, his labour, and all about him. ”

“ Is it not about time, then, to abandon the fiction that gold is either a standard of value or a medium of exchange, in any proper sense of the terms, and to take a forward step in the evolution of money by adopting a more scientific standard of value, and making the money, as a measure of value, conform thereto? ”

“ Some Frenchman has said that the moneymaking instinct is like the talent of certain pigs for smelling truffles. In Perigord they pay a high price for a shoat with that kind of a nose. I have learned something about painting because I love it, and I know how to make money. ”

“ There, instead of the amount being excessively small, it is exceedingly great; for a talent was worth some £400, and ten talents would be £4000, a fair capital for a man to start with. The other point of difference between the two parables, which belongs to the essence of each, is that while the gift in the one case is identical, in the other case it is graduated and different. ”

“ What makes the distinction is the quality of our acts. Everything in the material and the spiritual worlds is judged according to quality. Gold, diamonds, clothes, bricks, music, poetry, literature, are adjudged, in the last resort, on the basis of intrinsic value. When people are engaged in pursuits for the sake of money the results will be on a plane with the quality of the incentive. ”

“ It's seldom I sigh for unlimited gold Or the power of a rich man to buy; My courage is stout when the doing without Is only my duty, but I Curse the shackles of thrift when I gaze at the toys That my kiddies are eager to own, And I'd buy everything that they wish for, by Jing! If their mother would let me alone. There isn't much fun spending coin on myself For neckties and up-to-date lids, But there's pleasure tenfold, in the silver and gold I part with for things for the kids. ”

“ We are too much in the habit, in these days, of acting as if Art worth a price in the market were a commodity which people could be generally taught to produce, and as if the education of the artist, not his capacity, gave the sterling value to his work. ”

“ The nations are growing wealthy; gold is the sole object of ambition, of toil, of production, of trade. For gold the industrious strive, the duke marries, the boss robs, the politician ‘negotiates,’ the lawyer deceives, the judge decrees, the noble cheats, and the ‘parson’—takes up a collection. In this enormous confusion, a great many people get a lot of exercise—a few, ‘clip the coupons,’ and are happy.
“But the superior Outeroos are only veneered pagans, my children, and gold is the universal god. ”

“ How will the graduate, the trained young man or woman answer it?
The dollar stands out so strongly in all the undertakings of life that the ideal is often lowered or lost, the artistic suffers, the soul's wings are weighted down with gold. ”

“ Your true business man makes a practice of weighing everything in terms of gold: a human being, a field of wheat, a beam, a precious stone. His tables of value are false, but the principle of valuation remains none the less efficacious, fundamental. ”

“ The fame of a great man out-distances all accumulations of compound interest on the original price of his early and perhaps finest works—for one grudging buyer of the work of an unknown genius, there are hundreds who, at the end of a decade, will gladly buy, at almost any price, the works of the great artist of the age ”

“ Men otherwise of very good sense have been drawn into this practice through an overweening desire of sudden wealth, and an easy credulity of what they so earnestly wished might be true. There seems to be some peculiar charm in the conceit of finding money and if the sands of Schuylkill were so much mixed with small grains of gold that a man might in a day's time with care and application get together to the value of half a crown, I make no question but we should find several people employed there that can with ease earn five shillings a day at their proper trade. ”

“ What you can manufacture, or communicate, you can lower the price of, but this mental supremacy is incommunicable; you will never multiply its quantity, nor lower its price; and nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this; learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamonds from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds out of our own charcoal. ”

“ It occurs to me that an objection may be raised to my argument classing gold as wealth, and defining wealth to be that which can be made use of to minister to life, comfort and happiness; or perhaps to the distinction of permanent and transitory wealth. Gold, as permanent wealth, can only minister to man through its exchange for other valuables of which direct use can be made. It may be said that in that sense gold can legitimately be money. ”

“ It seems to me that money has lost more than half its value since cheques became common. When men kept their gold in iron coffers, lock-fast cupboards, or a pot buried in an orchard, there was something tangible in wealth. ”

“ Never perhaps was a young man freer from thought and influence of money than he, more absorbed in professional study and untainted by the supremacies of property. But for all that he was human, and English, and theoretically accepted gold as the thing of things, the one great aim and measure of success. Of other men's success, that is, and their aim, not his. ”

“ It may be desirable for us to have much art, or little—we will examine that by-and-bye; but just now, let us keep to the simple consideration how to get plenty of good art if we want it. Perhaps it might be just as well that a man of moderate income should be able to possess a good picture, as that any work of real merit should cost 500l. or 1,000l.; at all events, it is certainly one of the branches of political economy to ascertain how, if we like, we can get things in quantities—plenty of corn, plenty of wine, plenty of gold, or plenty of pictures. ”

“ Considering that the times are hard, and that pictures are luxuries, the sum thus paid for art treasures, so soon after the centennial purchases, is a proof of the number of good patrons that can be counted on when works of value are for sale. ”

“ The psychological fact, however, which we must here notice is this—that the pecuniary reward, though it seems theoretically to be in contrast to any genuine desire for other men’s approbation, or for the pleasure brought to the worker by the work itself, instead of destroying the force of those other motives, increases it, just as the admixture of a certain amount of alloy makes gold and silver more valuable for artistic purposes. ”

“ All this it does in its practical, money-making, worldly side, which is to me the under-side of art; for, after all, money-making, although a very useful accomplishment as far as the world goes, is not a very noble or high gift, excepting for the power which it gives to the lucky possessor to do good to his less fortunate fellow-creatures. ”

“ As in popular language to grow rich is to accumulate “money,” and to grow poor is to lose “money,” this term became a synonym for “wealth”; and, till recently at least, all the nations of Europe studied every means of accumulating gold and silver in their respective countries. ”

“ And, generally speaking, the occupation of a large number of hands in painting or sculpture in any nation may be considered as tending to check the disposition to indulge in perishable luxury. I do not, however, in my assumption that works of art are treasures, take much into consideration this collateral monetary result. I consider them treasures, merely as permanent means of pleasure and instruction ”

“ The immortal singer of songs, and all his descendants, received infinitely less for all the works of his genius than an ordinary gambler often gets for one sale of something that he never owned, or one purchase of something that he never bought; and it is doubtful if all the masterpieces of the world in art, in literature, and in science, ever brought as much cash to those whose great, patient brains have carefully and honestly wrought that the earth might be richer and better and brighter, as has been often “made” by one inferior speculator upon a single issue of watered stock. ”

“ In issuing so many promissory notes upon the bank of fame, do not forget you have to pay in sterling gold. Believe that there is something in the pursuit of high art, beyond the manufacture of a paragraph or the collection of receipts at the door of an exhibition. ”

“ Small Change.—In common life, one much oftener wants small money, and silver, than gold. Give me a man who has ready cash about him for present expenses, shillings, half-crowns, and crowns, which circulate easily; but a man who has only an ingot of gold about him is much above common purposes, [Pg 324] and his riches are not handy nor convenient. Have as much gold as you please in one pocket, but take care always to keep change in the other; for you will much oftener have occasion for a shilling than for a guinea. ”

“ He knows how much they cost him, and he keeps the run of the quotations at the auction sales, congratulating himself as the price of the works of his well-chosen artists rises in the scale, and the value of his art treasures is enhanced. ”

“ At present I own not a single penny, and without money you can do nothing." "I will aid you," returned the blacksmith. "Five dollars are all that I have, but I will share them with you, my friend. Two dollars and fifty cents will reach far in a thrifty man's hand. ”

“ We would come nearer the truth if we likened ideas to pure gold in the ingot, that may be worked into any shape, applied to any purpose, forming the standard of value in the world of letters, yet capable of being spread out to infinitesimal thinness, in order to give cheapness the glitter of a spurious worth. ”

“ When a sensible man deals with kings, if he does not get money, he can always have money’s worth.’
This speech the pearl merchant, or jeweller, delivered [Pg 323] with abundance of nods and winks and shrugs, as though there were many meanings in it, out of which I was welcome to take my own. Then he whispered—
‘If you would have gold cheap, know the miners. If you would have pearls cheap, make much of the divers. ”