Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

A sentence like "All things are difficult before they are easy" sounds like comfort, but its real move is moral: it reframes struggle as a feature, not a failure. Fuller, a 17th-century English cleric writing in an age of civil war, religious faction, and social instability, wasn’t peddling motivational wallpaper. He was shaping a temperament. If difficulty is the default opening chapter, then impatience becomes a kind of spiritual error, and perseverance turns into evidence of character.

The line’s power comes from its blunt universality. "All things" refuses the loopholes we reach for when we want our own hardship to count as exceptional. That sweep can feel severe, even puritanical: you don’t get to dramatize your suffering as uniquely unfair; you get to work. Yet it’s also quietly egalitarian. Everyone pays the entry fee. Mastery isn’t a private gift bestowed on the naturally talented; it’s a public process available to the stubborn.

"Before" is the hinge word. Fuller builds time into the claim, smuggling in hope without promising quick results. Difficulty becomes temporary by definition, but only if you keep moving through it. In a clerical context, that fits a theology of discipline: the self is trained, not indulged; virtue is practiced into existence.

What makes the aphorism endure is its refusal to sentimentalize effort. It doesn’t say the hard part is meaningful, or that pain is noble. It simply insists that ease is earned, and that the path to fluency - in faith, craft, or life - is embarrassingly unglamorous.