Life & Wisdom Quote by Adelaide Anne Procter

A prayer that refuses the easy bargain is still a prayer - but Procter makes it sound like a moral stance. “I do not ask, O Lord, that life may be a pleasant road” opens by rejecting the most common religious request: comfort. The line’s power comes from its deliberate downshifting of ambition. She doesn’t posture as fearless; she simply refuses to treat hardship as a clerical error that God should correct.

The phrase “pleasant road” is quietly pointed. Roads are for travel, not lounging; they imply destination, duty, and endurance. By choosing that image, Procter smuggles in a Victorian ethic of progress and responsibility, where suffering isn’t romanticized but assumed as part of movement through the world. The subtext is a rebuke to sentimental piety: faith that only works when it works like customer service isn’t faith, it’s consumerism with hymns.

Context matters here. Procter wrote amid a 19th-century culture saturated with devotional verse, much of it designed to domesticate grief into something tasteful and manageable. She was also a Catholic convert in Protestant England, writing in a period when public faith was both socially policed and privately necessary. The address “O Lord” carries intimacy, but the sentence structure carries discipline: she speaks to God the way you speak to power when you can’t afford illusions.

The intent isn’t masochism. It’s a recalibration of what’s reasonable to ask for: not a painless life, but the strength, clarity, or courage to walk the road as it is. That’s why the line endures; it replaces the fantasy of escape with a demand for stamina.