Did Jiraiya Really Say “A Person Grows Up When He's Able to Overcome Hardships”?

Yes. Jiraiya's line about growing up through hardship is real, and the detail the memes leave out is the form: it is not something he says, it is something he writes. Wikiquote's Shippuden page records it as a letter, addressed to Tsunade, and the sentence people share is close to the transcript.

The verdict

True. The entry on Wikiquote reads, in the dub's words, "Jiraiya: [In a letter] Tsunade, a person grows up when he's able to overcome hardships. Protection is important, but there are some things that a person must learn on his own." The quote sites have it right down to the second sentence, which is unusual; most drop the qualifier about protection and keep only the half that fits on an image. Both halves are his.

The letter, and who it is about

The letter is about Naruto. Jiraiya is arguing that the boy should be allowed to face something dangerous rather than be kept safe, and "protection is important, but" is the whole argument in four words: a teacher telling a Hokage that shielding a student is a way of stunting him. Read as a life maxim, the first sentence is stock. Read as the second sentence's setup, it is a position in an argument between two people who both love the same reckless kid and disagree about what love requires. The letter form also means Jiraiya is not in the room; his opinion arrives on paper, which is how the series handles him whenever it wants his voice to carry more than his presence would.

Why it circulates as a saying

Because it is one, in shape: a general claim about people, a concession, a rule. Jiraiya is the character the fandom has assigned the role of wise pervert, and lines like this get lifted from him more readily than from anyone else in the series because they sound like what he is supposed to be. The lifting is fair. The attribution is right, the words are right, and the only loss is the context, which is the letter and the boy it is about.

What it becomes later

Jiraiya dies in the Pain arc without seeing whether his argument held, and the series answers him in the affirmative: the student he wanted exposed to hardship is the one who ends the war. His death is the hardship Naruto is left to overcome, which gives the letter the shape of a prediction he did not know he was making. His lines, when the Naruto corpus on this site reaches him, will be checked against the same page; for now the series' verified quotes are on the Naruto hub.

How we checked

The verification process asks for a primary or editorial source, and Wikiquote's transcript supplies the primary one, with the speaker, the form and the wording. The episode is not stated on the page, so this article does not state one either. The entry in the fact-check database is true, listed for the same reason as the other confirmed lines there: the question gets asked, and the answer deserves to be checkable.