Life & Wisdom Quote by Amy Lowell

Cheer, Lowell argues, isn’t naive optimism; it’s an act of mental hygiene. The line turns on a small, surgical reversal: the “misfortunes hardest to bear” are not the ones that strike, but the ones we rehearse in advance. She’s diagnosing a familiar modern illness before it had a name: the way imagination, untethered, becomes a private catastrophe factory. The trick is that she doesn’t scold the worrier. She offers comfort with a wink of realism, granting that suffering is inevitable, then pointing out how much of it we voluntarily manufacture.

The intent is practical, almost stoic, but softened by “Let us,” a communal invitation rather than a self-help command. “Be of cheer” lands like an old-fashioned benediction, while “remembering” frames the cure as recollection, not reinvention. You already know this, she implies; you just forget when the mind starts sprinting ahead.

Subtext: anxiety is a storyteller, and its best-selling genre is disaster. The line exposes how dread steals energy twice: first in anticipation, then again when the feared event fails to materialize and we realize we paid full price for a ticket to a show that never opened.

Context matters. Lowell wrote amid the churn of early 20th-century life: accelerating cities, public calamities, private grief, World War I’s shadow. Modernist poets were retooling language to match a world that felt newly unstable. Her sentence meets that instability with a paradoxical balm: the future will hurt, yes, but the mind’s speculative bruises are often the most pointless.