Meaning & Analysis
The most worthy goods—virtue, excellence, fine workmanship—are hard to achieve; they demand effort, discipline, and time.
Insights
Moral ascent
Virtue lies uphill: honesty, justice, and temperance resist easy paths, requiring repeated choices against comfort and impulse.
Craft and mastery
True quality in arts and trades comes only through long practice; the difficulty is the furnace that tempers skill into excellence.
Filtering function
Hardness acts as a gate, separating casual interest from serious commitment; difficulty signals and safeguards value.
Rarity through effort
Things rare are hard to make and thus prized; the proverb links scarcity not merely to chance but to labor-intensive creation.
Formation of the self
The quest for good things refashions the seeker; endurance and patience are themselves goods born from the very difficulty pursued.
Humanist lineage
Erasmus’s tag—Difficilia quae pulchra (‘the beautiful/noble things are difficult’)—echoes the Greek maxim χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά, rooting the saying in a classical ethic that weds goodness, beauty, and arduous pursuit.
Solonian road
Early glossators invoke Solon: the way of honor and virtue is ‘uneasy, painful, hazardous.’ The proverb thus functions as moral cartography, warning that straight roads are seldom the best roads.
Psychology of effort
Effort-justification and ‘grit’ research align with the maxim: costs paid increase valuation and adherence, which explains why ‘things hardly attained are long retained.’
Gatekeeping caution
Difficulty can be natural (complexity) or contrived (exams, fees, pedigree). The proverb can inspire perseverance—or rationalize exclusion; wisdom discerns the difference.
Counterpoint web
It harmonizes with ‘The best things are worst to come by’ yet converses with abundance maxims (‘The more common a good thing the better’): some goods perfect through sharing, others through struggle.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis (implied)
Sets ‘good’ against ‘easy’ without naming the latter, creating a silent contrast that sharpens the claim.
Sententia
A compact, axiomatic form lends curricular authority, fit for copybooks and sermons alike.
Elliptical brevity
Few words carry wide scope, inviting listeners to supply examples from morals, crafts, and study.
Alliteration
The soft g-/d- pairing in ‘good’/‘difficult’ adds a subtle sonic hinge that aids recall.
Transcription
Quotations
Difficilia quae pulchra.
For it is said in a prouerbe: Good thinges are difficile.
Harde or difficile be those thynges that be goodly or honeste. This sentence of the wyse man Solon declarethe vnto vs that the waye of honestie, of virtue, of renown, is vneasye, paynful, iepardouse, harde.
The rarest things are most difficult.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.