This is genuine Adam Smith, word for word. It opens the second paragraph of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter V — “Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities” — and the wording is confirmed in the full text at Project Gutenberg, Wikisource and Econlib’s Cannan edition.
“The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), Book I, Chapter V. Verified via Quotle.info.
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Provenance
The source
Work
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Location
Book I, Chapter V — “Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities, or of their Price in Labour, and their Price in Money”, second paragraph
First published
9 March 1776 · London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, in two volumes (Books I–III in volume one)
Text used
Edwin Cannan, ed. (London: Methuen, 1904), following Smith’s fifth edition of 1789
Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniencies, and amusements of human life. … The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.
chapter opening
Transcribed from the Project Gutenberg text, which preserves the eighteenth-century spellings — conveniencies, and every thing as two words. Modernised reprints close up “everything”; the sense is unchanged.
Panmure House ↗ — the Edinburgh house where Smith died, now run by Heriot-Watt University’s Edinburgh Business School — quotes the sentence in Smith’s own spelling and cites it to Wealth of Nations I:V, p. 47, referencing the 1976 Clarendon Press edition of his works.
The Wealth of Nations was first published in London on 9 March 1776 and Adam Smith died in 1790, so both the work and this sentence are firmly in the public domain in the United States. The scholarly edition quoted here — Edwin Cannan’s, published by Methuen in 1904 — is itself long out of copyright, as is the 1776 first-edition scan. Modern annotated editions such as the 1976 Glasgow/Clarendon text carry their own editorial copyright, but Smith’s words do not.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What gets mangled
The attribution here is solid — Smith really wrote it. What goes wrong is the wording, and the company the sentence keeps.
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Wording“The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.” Trimmed
The version that dominates quote sites cuts the middle clause out entirely. Goodreads ↗ and Quotefancy ↗ both carry the short form credited to Smith with no source work named at all. It reads like an aphorism, but Smith wrote a definition — the excised clause (“what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it”) is the part doing the analytical work.
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Spelling“everything” as one word Modernised
Smith’s text prints every thing as two words, and eighteenth-century editions preserve it that way — the Project Gutenberg text ↗ and Econlib’s Cannan edition both do. Modernised reprints such as the Marxists Internet Archive transcription ↗ close it up. Harmless, but it is an editor’s choice, not Smith’s.
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Adjacent lineHenry David Thoreau Different author
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it” is routinely set beside this sentence and sometimes swapped for it. That line is Thoreau’s idea, not Smith’s — and the Walden Woods Project lists that popular phrasing on its misquotation page ↗, giving the real Walden wording as “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
✓Smith wrote the sentence, in full, in 1776 — Book I, Chapter V of The Wealth of Nations. If you are quoting him, quote the whole thing: the Cannan edition text is at Econlib ↗.
Context
Why it mattered
Smith is doing something sneaky here, and it is easy to miss because the sentence sounds like a proverb. He has just argued that after the division of labour takes hold, almost everything you consume comes from other people’s work — so being rich means commanding labour, not holding coins. The “real price” sentence is the hinge: strip away money, and what a thing costs you is effort. Money, in the rest of the chapter, is only the nominal price — a convenient but wobbly ruler, because the value of silver itself drifts.
The sentence immediately after is the half that rarely gets quoted, and it completes the thought: what a thing is worth to whoever already owns it is “the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.” Cost and worth are the same substance, labour, viewed from two ends of a trade. This chapter is the seed of the labour theory of value that David Ricardo and later Karl Marx would each take in very different directions.
Strip away money, and what a thing costs you is effort.
Where the sentence sits in the book
Book I of The Wealth of Nations moves in sequence: Chapter I on the division of labour (the famous pin factory), Chapter II on the propensity to truck and barter, Chapter III on the extent of the market, Chapter IV on the origin and use of money — and then Chapter V, which asks what a price actually measures. Books I–III filled volume one of the original two-volume 1776 set.
Smith kept revising. The text most commonly reprinted today — including Edwin Cannan’s 1904 edition used by Econlib — follows the fifth edition of 1789, the last published in Smith’s lifetime. The wording of this particular sentence is stable across the editions in circulation.
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1723–1790 · Scottish moral philosopher and political economist
Adam Smith was baptised in Kirkcaldy, Fife, in June 1723 and spent his working life as a philosopher rather than an economist — he held the chairs of logic and then moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. His first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), was about sympathy and conscience; the one everybody quotes, The Wealth of Nations, came seventeen years later in 1776. He died in Edinburgh on 17 July 1790, and the house he died in, Panmure House, is now a research centre devoted to his work.
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Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), Book I, Chapter V, “Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities, or of their Price in Labour, and their Price in Money.” Text as given in Edwin Cannan, ed., The Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1904), I.5.2.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-real-price-of-every-thing-what-every-thing-really-costs/