Q0266

Henry David Thoreau

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.
Thinker Henry David Thoreau
School Transcendentalism
Source Walden, Economy
Theme Philosophy
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Walden, Economy, within the tradition of Transcendentalism. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of philosophy, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Henry David Thoreau's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Henry David Thoreau. (n.d.). The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0266

MLA: Henry David Thoreau. “The cost of a thing is the amount….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0266.

Chicago: Henry David Thoreau. “The cost of a thing is the amount….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0266.

Same thinker

More from Henry David Thoreau

  1. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.
  2. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
  3. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
  4. Simplify, simplify.
  5. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

All quotations by Henry David Thoreau

Same theme

More on philosophy

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. A person's character is their destiny.
  3. What is opposed brings together; from what differs comes the finest harmony.
  4. Death is nothing to us: for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
  5. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.

Browse the philosophy theme