Helen Keller's claim carries weight precisely because she earned it through circumstance, not philosophy—yet she refuses to romanticize hardship as inherently noble. The subtler truth here is that suffering alone builds nothing; it's the *choosing* to grow through difficulty that strengthens character, a distinction most platitudes miss. When you watch someone recover from genuine setback—a business failure, a health crisis—what actually matters isn't the pain they endured but whether they extracted meaning from it and moved differently forward. Keller understood that ease doesn't make us shallow so much as it leaves us untested in our own eyes, which may be the most corrosive poverty of all.