Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

This remark is associated with Theodore Roosevelt’s public ethic of “the strenuous life,” a theme he promoted repeatedly as a private citizen and later as president. Roosevelt—often sickly as a child and then self-fashioned into an outdoorsman, reformer, and soldier—used speeches and essays to argue that individual character and national greatness are forged through hardship rather than comfort. The quotation is commonly cited in connection with his late-19th/early-20th-century addresses urging Americans to embrace duty, discipline, and difficult work in public service and personal life, reflecting his broader moral and civic philosophy rather than a casual aside.

Roosevelt frames struggle as the price—and proof—of anything genuinely valuable. “Effort, pain, difficulty” are not incidental costs but the very conditions that make achievement meaningful. The second half shifts from abstract principle to moral judgment: he refuses to admire ease, because an “easy life” evades the tests that reveal courage, endurance, and responsibility. What he “envies” is not suffering for its own sake but the capacity to meet hard circumstances well—turning adversity into character. The quote encapsulates Roosevelt’s belief that virtue is active and strenuous, and that a life’s worth is measured by how one answers demanding obligations.