“That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.”
March 11, 1856
Journals (1838-1859)
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Henry David Thoreau 385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes

“Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.”
(Lyrics from Justify My Love).

Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)
Context: If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

“In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.”
#110
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

The Usurpation Of Language (1910)
Context: Are not the richest and most significant experiences of man precisely those which are the least patient of verbal reproduction? A book, a treatise, a discourse, is the very thing that cannot contain them, that can contain at most their lower elements, their less significant aspects. Who shall transfer them to paper, write them in ink, utter them in words? And yet, though inexpressible thus, these things crave expression, for they are full of meaning and must be expressed. They have a language of their own. Art can utter some of them, and Nature, perhaps, can interpret them all. They borrow her tongues, speaking in the winds, singing in the voice of moving waters, looking down upon us in the cold shining of the stars. What they mean, we, too, can express; but we express it, not by speaking there and then, but by all that we become through their influence, by all that we are led to do, through their compelling, till life shall end.

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)
Variant: The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on the earth.

"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one sense, the richest man that ever lived — and yet was he worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire there was no telling to what measures the Government might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately and institute a monopoly.

translated as The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 49.
Discipleship (1937), Costly Grace