About

God Gives His Hardest Battles To His Strongest Soldiers or God Gives His Hardest Battles To His Toughest Soldiers refers to a common motivational poster and catchphrase that has been used online for decades in genuine, ironic and sarcastic instances, often through the use of image macro memes. Though used as part of a positive motivational way, it wasn't until 2020 that the meme took on a new meaning and started to be attributed to clowns and funny battles.

Origin

The phrase "God Gives His Hardest Battles To His Strongest Soldiers" has been in circulation for decades unironically, being said to people going through tough times. In early internet usage, the quote was inspirational, used on images of beaches and starry nights as a way of helping others to stay strong and encouraged. Though the origin is unknown, the earliest recorded use of the quote is on Pinterest^[1]. The quote is pinned under the tag 'wisdom' by Mavic Cruz on September 27th, 2009 (shown below).

This usage of the phrase lasted for a couple of years before it started to get used on images in a way that appears inspirational but could easily be seen as ironic or similar to posts from the /r/okbuddyretard subreddit today.

The first example of this is with a starving Somali child photographed coming into Kenya to escape famine in 2011, with the meme being made on November 14th, 2013, on the website Memegenerator^[2] (shown below).

Spread

On September 8th, 2016, the website Memegenerator^[3] had the now ironic usage of the phrase combined with the photo of The Vulture and The Little Girl^[4], a famous photo showing a collapsed child with a vulture lurking nearby, signifying imminent death (shown below).

With the revival of the meme format through a Wojak variant, called Stop Giving Me Your Toughest Battles, the original meme was once again brought up, but this time in a more modern way. Instead of having the picture change to match the phrase, the phrase was changed to match the picture, with it being a picture of a clown proclaiming that 'God gives his silliest battles to his funniest clowns'. The first example of this post was done on iFunny on May 7th, 2021, by the user antimouse^[5] (shown below).

On September 2nd, 2021, the iFunny^[6] user navallnappropriate posted a tweet by @yungchomsky in which the phrase is tweaked slightly to be about meme page admins (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References