The use of negative with indefinite pronouns

Question

Is it correct to say: Everything doesn't go easy in life. Or should one say : Not everything goes easy in life.

Answer 1

Both are fine but Not everything goes easy in life rolls off my tongue. My edit: Life isn't easy

Answer 2

Both are correct, but they imply different things.

If I felt that most things in life were easy but some were not easy, I would use the second sentence.

A reader might incorrectly interpret the first sentence to mean that nothing in life is easy.

Answer 3

If you interpret the statements the way mathematicians do when reading symbolic logic, the two statements mean radically different things. Many other people treat the two statements as being interchangeable. This is much like the problem of double negatives where some read them as cancelling out, and others as emphasis.

Putting the negative first is not a problem. "not every x is" is generally agreed upon as meaning "at least one x is not". (The negative of a universal statement is an existential statement) The problem is that if you negate after the indication that you are making a universal statement ("each", "every", "all", "none", etc) then some people consider that to be negating the statement inside the universal ("every (x is not)"), while other people consider the negation to apply to the universal from "outside" while leaving the statement inside it positive regardless of where the negative is ("(every x is) not").