Education Quote by William Pennington

Pennington’s line doesn’t romanticize suffering so much as it disciplines the fantasy that adulthood is a problem you can solve once and for all. “The great duty” is a loaded phrase from a 19th-century political mind: duty implies citizenship, public character, and self-management. He’s not offering comfort; he’s setting expectations. Care (worry, burden, responsibility) isn’t an aberration from the good life but a permanent feature of it, and the moral test is how you carry it.

The subtext is a rebuke to two temptations: first, the utopian promise that prosperity, reform, or personal virtue will deliver a life “free from care”; second, the more private indulgence of self-pity. By framing the task as “learn how to bear it,” Pennington makes resilience a skill rather than a temperament. That’s quietly democratic. You don’t need to be born heroic; you can practice. “Brave and cheerful” is also a strategic pairing: bravery without cheer curdles into grim stoicism; cheer without bravery becomes denial. He’s arguing for a public-facing composure that steadies others, the emotional equivalent of sound governance.

Context matters. Pennington lived through an America convulsed by economic panics, sectional conflict, and the approach of civil war. For politicians of his era, anxiety wasn’t just personal; it was structural. The sentence reads like civic training: a reminder that stability is partly theatrical, that leaders (and citizens) must project courage and optimism even when the ledger of reality won’t cooperate. It’s resilience as rhetoric, yes, but also resilience as social glue.