No Pain, No Gain

An idea with a genuinely ancient pedigree. The Greek playwright Sophocles wrote "there's no success without pain" in his play Electra in the 5th century BC, and the Jewish text Pirkei Avot makes a very similar spiritual point. In English, the sentiment is documented from the 1500s, appearing in John Ray's 1670 proverb collection as "without pains, no gains," and in poet Robert Herrick's Hesperides (1650). The catchy modern rhyming form owes its huge popularity to American actress Jane Fonda, who used "no pain, no gain" repeatedly throughout her hugely popular 1982 aerobics workout videos.