The cost of a thing is the amount of what…

The definition appears in “Economy”, the first and longest chapter of Walden, where Thoreau weighs what a house really costs. He has just answered the objection that the civilized man who pays rent gets “a palace compared with the savage’s”. Why, then, is he so commonly poor, while the savage is “rich as a savage”? If civilization is a real advance, it must produce better dwellings “without making them more costly”. The line gives the measure, and Thoreau applies it at once: an average house in his neighbourhood costs about eight hundred dollars, ten to fifteen years of a labourer’s life at a dollar a day.

Thoreau lived in his own cabin by Walden Pond from July 1845 to September 1847, on land belonging to Emerson, and the chapter itemizes what it cost him: a little over twenty-eight dollars. Walden appeared in 1854.

By measuring price in life rather than money, the sentence founds the argument for simple living, and it is still quoted by those who ask what work is for.

Walden, “Economy”, 1854

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work