This too shall pass: where the line comes from and what it is for

“This too shall pass.” Four words, no author, and almost everybody who says them believes they are scripture. They are not. The line is older than the person it is usually credited to, younger than the tradition it is usually filed under, and its history is more interesting than the misattribution.

We print it, so we owe it the research.

It is not in the Bible

This is the first thing to clear up, because it is the most common belief about the line and it is wrong. “This too shall pass” appears in no canonical Christian or Hebrew scripture, in any translation. Ecclesiastes gets close in spirit, with its seasons and its vanity, but the sentence itself is not there and never was.

The confusion is understandable. The cadence is biblical. The word order is archaic in a way that sounds translated from something ancient. That is a real feature of the line, not an accident, and it comes from the actual source.

The Persian trail

The oldest trail leads to medieval Persian Sufi poetry, where the story circulates in several forms. A king demands of his advisors a sentence that will be true in every circumstance, one that will steady him in triumph and console him in ruin. They bring him back a single phrase, and he has it engraved on a ring so it is always in view. The phrase is the one you know.

The tale is associated with Attar of Nishapur, the medieval Persian poet, and versions of it move through Persian literature for centuries before any of it reaches English. It arrived properly in English in 1852, when Edward FitzGerald, the same translator who later gave the language its Omar Khayyam, published a retelling of the Persian fable. The archaic ring in the sentence is FitzGerald’s Victorian English doing what Victorian English did to Persian verse.

Jewish folklore tells a close variant about King Solomon and a ring engraved gam zeh ya’avor, and that version is now the one most often repeated. It is a beautiful telling. The written trail for it is also late, which is worth knowing before you cite it as ancient.

Lincoln, and how the line became American

The line entered wide public use in America through Abraham Lincoln. Speaking to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society at Milwaukee on 30 September 1859, before the presidency and before the war, he told the story of the eastern monarch and his wise men, and quoted their sentence: “And this, too, shall pass away.”

Then he did something to it. “How much it expresses!” he said. “How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”

That is the sharpest reading of the line anybody has given it, and it is the reason to keep it. Lincoln understood that it cuts both ways.

What it actually asks

Most people meet these words as comfort, and comfort is half of the job. Grief passes. The bad quarter passes. The illness, the argument, the month you would rather not repeat: all of it is weather, and weather moves.

But the sentence is not consolation. It is a statement about the nature of things, and it applies to the good week exactly as much as the bad one. The promotion passes. The holiday passes. The evening when everyone you love is in the same room passes. A line that only worked on suffering would be a painkiller. This one is a description, and descriptions do not take sides.

Held honestly, that is what makes it useful rather than merely soothing. It loosens the grip on the bad thing, which is the easy half. It also asks you to notice the good thing while it is here, which is the half that changes a day.

Why we put it on a clock

A clock is the instrument of passing. It is the object in your house whose entire function is to record that this moment is being replaced by the next one, all day, whether you look or not.

Put these four words on that face and the two halves agree. The hands say the thing is moving. The words say what that means, and refuse to let it be only bad news.

We print this too shall pass to order in whatever colours the room wants, with a silent movement so the passing happens quietly. If you want the same idea with less on the wall, now is one word for it, or choose your own colours on either.