No pain, no gain Informal

Achieving something worthwhile requires effort, discomfort, or sacrifice; there are no meaningful results without some cost.

It’s used both as motivational encouragement, especially in fitness and training contexts, and as a general life philosophy about hard work.

Despite being widely and confidently attributed to Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” the underlying sentiment is far older than Franklin and appears across many unrelated ancient sources: the Greek poet Hesiod expressed a similar idea in “Works and Days” around the 7th century BC, Sophocles included a related line in his tragedy “Electra” around the 5th century BC, and the early rabbinic text “The Ethics of the Fathers” contains the maxim “according to the pain is the reward.” In English specifically, Nicholas Breton wrote “They must take pain that look for any gain” in 1577, and poet Robert Herrick published the closely matching couplet “No pains, no gains. / If little labour, little are our gains” in his 1650 collection “Hesperides” — both predating Franklin by well over a century. Franklin, writing as “Poor Richard” in the 1730s and later in “The Way to Wealth” (1758), did include his own version, “there are no gains, without pains,” which undoubtedly helped popularize the saying in America, but crediting him as its originator overlooks a proverb with genuinely ancient and cross-cultural roots.

Her trainer kept repeating, ‘no pain, no gain,’ through the last set of squats.

Learning a new language is frustrating at first, but no pain, no gain.

He pushed through the difficult training months, telling himself no pain, no gain.

A: Why do you keep doing such hard workouts? B: No pain, no gain, right?