Pushing to the Front

The obstacle is the way

Echoes

Marden writes that the boulder which was “an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the resolute”. He credits no one for it, and names Johnson only for a point about perseverance.

1. 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 1,720 years earlier.

2. 1894

   “The boulder which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the resolute.”