11
The obstacle is the way
Echoes, per a summary
Wikiquote has Frankl writing of the chance to use “the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford”. The framing is meaning in suffering, and no one is credited.
- c. 170 to 180 CE
“for the mind converts and changes every hindrance to its activity into an aid; and so that which is a hindrance is made a furtherance to an act; and that which is an obstacle on the road helps us on this road.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. Earliest we can find, about 1,770 years earlier.
- 1946
“Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him.”
Secondhand, from Wikiquote. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946).
This book is still in copyright, so we read an account of it, not the book.
Sources
Wikiquote: en.wikiquote.org/
Graham Mann’s notes: grahammann.net/