“Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing.”
Barry Finlay · Kilimanjaro and Beyond, 2011
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The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.
About this quote
Meaning
Molière is making a simple but powerful point: the harder a challenge is to overcome, the more credit and satisfaction a person earns by defeating it. Easy victories leave little impression on others or on ourselves, while struggles that genuinely test our limits produce a sense of accomplishment that lighter efforts never could. The quote encourages readers to reframe obstacles not as reasons to retreat but as measures of how meaningful the eventual win will be.
Context
This line comes from Le Dépit Amoureux, an early comedy Molière wrote and performed in France in 1656. The play is a lively piece built around romantic misunderstandings and the frustrations that come with love, but the sentiment expressed here reaches well beyond its comic setting. Molière frequently wove practical wisdom into his theatrical work, and lines like this one have continued to circulate long after the plays themselves faded from everyday conversation. The idea itself has roots in classical thought and was very much in keeping with the moralist tradition popular in seventeenth-century French literature.
About the author
Molière is the pen name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, a French playwright and actor widely regarded as one of the great masters of comedy in Western literature. Working in the seventeenth century, he produced a remarkable series of plays that satirized hypocrisy, vanity, and social pretension with sharp wit and genuine humanity. He enjoyed the patronage of the French royal court and performed before Louis XIV on numerous occasions. His works remain staples of the French theatrical tradition and are still staged regularly around the world.
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