Enter, stranger, but take heed
Of what awaits the sin of greed,
For those who take, but do not earn,
Must pay most dearly in their turn.
So if you seek beneath our floors
A treasure that was never yours,
Thief, you have been warned, beware
Of finding more than treasure there.(from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)
I guess ‘take’ and ‘earn’ both take implicit common object (a treasure or something). And ‘earn’ means ‘to deserve or get (something)’–– If there were intransitive examples in dictionaries for ‘take’, I might have thought ‘earn’ is ‘to get money for work that you do’. Are my guesses all right?