Difficulties break some men but make others

We searched Mandela's primary corpus for this line — *Long Walk to Freedom*, *Conversations with Myself*, the Nelson Mandela Foundation's authorised quotations volume, and documented speech transcripts, letters, and prison writings held in the Foundation and University of Cape Town archives — and found no verbatim instance of "Difficulties break some men but make others." The sentence circulates widely, usually as part of a longer passage ("No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying..."), but the printed appearances we could locate are recent compilation and inspirational titles (M.D. Sharma's *Top Inspiring Thoughts of Nelson Mandela*, Rhonda Jennifer's *Moving Forward with Power and Victory*, and others) that credit Mandela without pointing to an original document; several even trace their sourcing back to a 2013 news aggregator rather than a primary text. One book, Steven Segal's *Mandela's Leadership Legacy*, offers a "(Mandela, 1994: 612)" citation, which would place it around the era of *Long Walk to Freedom*, but we could not confirm the line at that reference in the actual work, so it remains a secondary claim rather than verification. The sentiment is consistent with themes Mandela returned to often — that adversity can strengthen rather than defeat — yet consistency of theme is not the same as documented authorship. We found no reputable source naming a competing author or a datable pre-Mandela instance, so despite the proverbial ring of the phrasing we have no positive grounds to call it misattributed, and no genuine scholarly dispute exists to call it disputed. On the evidence, this is a line broadly credited to Mandela but without a confirmed primary source behind it: attributed.