Stronger

If taken to its logical extreme, the statement "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" would seem to condone certain harmful activities that do not kill you but might degrade your health. For instance, smoking regularly would not necessarily kill you immediately nor, as deadly as it is, be your cause of death. Indeed, one could utilize the statement as a sort of nihilist hedonist creed, if one were to do simply apply the statement in its most absurd, literal fashion. In that regard, one might be pressed to find ways in which anything that doesn't kill you does indeed make you stronger, and not, as all things, simply reduced to suffering and dread.