“The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself - ultimate cost for perfect value.”
Source: Starship Troopers
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Robert A. Heinlein 557
American science fiction author 1907–1988Related quotes
Commencement speech http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/june20/gradtrans-062007.html, Stanford University (2007-06-17)
Speeches and lectures
“The gods have placed sweat as the price of all things.”
Perhaps a mistranslation of line 289 of Works and Days, actually:
: But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat
Misattributed
“For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.”
As quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 289.
“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”
Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)
Context: If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures- none lives so long a man. The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even even a single year in perfect serenity.
" The Neoliberal Arts: How College Sold Its Soul to the Market http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/," Harper's, September 2015, p. 26
“Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.”
Source: 1980s–1990s, Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996), Ch. 5 : Political Trade-Offs
“Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.”
It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.
Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter V, p. 38.
“I value all things only by the price they shall gain in eternity.”
As quoted in The Law of Rewards : Giving What You Can't Keep to Gain What You Can't Lose (2003 by Randy C. Alcorn, p. 18
General sources