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No. “Good things come to those who wait” is not in the Bible. The words do not appear anywhere in it — not in Psalms, not in Proverbs, not in the Gospels. It is an old proverb. The oldest written trail leads back to France in the 1500s, and the version with the word good in it became famous through a beer advert in the 1990s.
That is the short answer. The longer one is better, because the Bible does say a great deal about waiting. It simply never promises the thing the slogan promises.
If you have always assumed this one was a verse, you are in enormous company. It sounds like scripture. It gets said in church. It gets stitched onto cushions and printed in cards sent to people having a hard year. Nobody who passes it on is trying to mislead anyone. They are trying to help.
Where “good things come to those who wait” actually comes from
The trail is longer than you would expect, and it changes shape at every step.
The 1500s, in French. The oldest form anyone has traced is “Tout vient à point qui peut attendre.” In 1884 a French scholar named A. Delboulle wrote a short note on this proverb in the journal Romania (volume 13, pages 425–426). He said plainly that he had no examples of it older than the sixteenth century, and he listed the writers who used it then — among them the poet Clément Marot, the proverb collector Gabriel Meurier, and the French dictionary of Oudin.
Two things about that old French line are worth slowing down for.
It says peut — “can” — not sait, “knows how to”. The modern French version, the one everybody says now, is “to the one who knows how to wait”. The old one was humbler. It was about being able to wait, which is a very different thing when you have no choice.
And it contains the words à point — “in good time”, “at the right moment”. The old proverb was not a promise about what arrives. It was an observation about when. Everything arrives at its proper moment for the person who can hold on. English dropped that clause completely, and the dropping of it is most of how we got here.
1863, in Massachusetts. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published Tales of a Wayside Inn, and one of its stories, “The Falcon of Ser Federigo”, ends with the line: “All things come round to him who will but wait.” You can read it yourself in the full text of the book.
Here is the part nobody mentions. In Longfellow’s poem, that sentence is not advice. It is an inscription carved on the back of a chair, underneath a wooden carving of a falcon.
The story behind the carving is this. Federigo has spent his whole fortune courting a woman who would not have him. All he has left is a hunting bird he loves. One morning she finally comes to his cottage, and he has no food in the house, so he kills the falcon and serves it to her. Then she tells him why she came: her little boy is dying, and the one thing the child wants is that bird. Three days later the child is dead. Three months after that, she marries Federigo.
So the most famous early English printing of this saying sits under a carving of the creature the waiting cost, in a house where a child died in the middle of it. Longfellow knew exactly what he was doing. The line is not cheerful. It is rueful.
1872, in London. Search for the origin of this saying online and you will almost always be told it was coined by the English poet Violet Fane — the pen name of Mary Montgomerie Lamb, later Lady Currie — in a poem called “Tout vient à qui sait attendre”, usually dated to around 1892.
That is wrong twice, and the real version is better.
The poem is twenty years older than people say. It is printed on pages 83 to 85 of her first collection, From Dawn to Noon, published in London by Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1872. The scanned book is free to read online, title page and all. It was reprinted in her two-volume Poems in 1892, which is probably where the later date came from.
And she did not coin the line. She put it in quotation marks, and in the very first stanza she wrote that the idea “has been said by one who knew.” She was quoting a proverb she expected her readers to recognise. The woman the whole internet credits with inventing this saying was passing on something she had been handed.
Then look at how her poem ends:
Ah, “All things come to those who wait”
(I say these words to make me glad),
But something answers soft and sad —
“They come, but often come too late!”
Read that again. She is not teaching the proverb. She is saying it out loud to comfort herself, and admitting that it does not quite work. The poem around it is about two people who loved each other at the wrong times — her heart turning towards him after his had turned away.
So the two most quoted literary sources for this saying both attached a sad second half to it. And both times, we kept the first half and threw the second half away.
1996, in an advertising pitch. The word good is the newest piece. “Good things come to those who wait” became a global phrase as a slogan for Guinness in the United Kingdom. The agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO won the Guinness account in 1996 with a pitch built around it, and the first advert in the campaign went out on 16 May 1998.
The problem the slogan was hired to solve was this: a pint of Guinness takes about 119.5 seconds to pour, and customers were impatient. The line was written to make people feel good about standing at a bar.
To be careful about what we can and cannot claim: we could not find an early printed example of the exact “good things” wording, so we are not going to tell you that an advertising agency invented it. What we can say is that every documented old version — the French, Longfellow’s, Fane’s — says all things or everything. Not good things. Somewhere between a sixteenth-century proverb about timing and a twentieth-century slogan about beer, “everything arrives eventually” quietly became “nice things are coming”.
What the Bible actually says about waiting
Here is the strange thing. Scripture is full of waiting. It may be one of its biggest subjects. But read the verses closely and you will notice they are built differently from the slogan.
Start with the verse that comes closest, Lamentations 3:25:
The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.
Look at the small word in the middle. Not “good things come to” the waiting person. God is good unto them. The goodness in that sentence is not a parcel that arrives at the end. It is God, present, with the person who is still waiting. We have written more about that verse in this study of Lamentations 3:25.
Isaiah 30:18 does the same thing: “blessed are all they that wait for him.” Not “blessed are they who will one day get what they waited for”. Blessed are they. Present tense. The blessing is on the person standing in the queue, today, outcome unknown.
Psalm 27:14 is the same shape again:
Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.
What is promised there? A strengthened heart. Not the job, not the test result, not the phone call. A heart that can keep standing.
Isaiah 40:31 promises renewed strength in the same way — “they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” That verse is often read as a promise that the waiting will end. It is actually a promise about what happens to you inside it. The Hebrew word behind “wait” there is far more active than the English suggests, and we dug into it in this word study on Isaiah 40:31.
Scripture does sometimes say that something is coming. Habakkuk 2:3 says of a specific promise given to a specific prophet: “though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.” But notice the clause right before it — “the vision is yet for an appointed time.” Appointed by God, not by the person waiting. That is not the slogan’s arithmetic. The slogan makes the waiting the cause. Scripture makes God the cause, and the waiting the place you stand while God works.
And then there is a verse the cushions never carry. Hebrews 11:13, about the great names of faith:
These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
They waited. They died waiting. And the Bible puts them in its hall of faith anyway, with no apology and no explanation. A book willing to print that sentence is not the same book as a slogan that guarantees a happy ending.
One last detail, for anyone who has quietly wondered whether the saying was a verse they half-remembered. The King James Bible almost never uses the phrase “those who” — it says “them that”. In the whole book, “those who” turns up only twice, both of them in Hebrews. It says “they that wait upon the LORD”, “them that wait for him”, “all they that wait for him”. Even the grammar of “good things come to those who wait” is too modern to be King James English.
Why the difference matters
This is not a point about pedantry. It is about who hears this sentence.
“Good things come to those who wait” gets said to a woman in her seventh year of trying for a baby. To a man whose visa application has been sitting in an office for two years while his family lives in another country. To someone in a hospital corridor waiting on a scan. To a mother whose son has not called since March.
It is almost always said with love. But listen to what it actually claims. It is a sum: you wait, good things arrive. Which means that if the good thing has not arrived, the sum has an answer, and the answer is you. You did not wait long enough. You did not wait well enough. You waited the wrong way.
Nobody who says the sentence means that. But it is in there, and the person in the long wait can hear it.
The verses do not do that. Lamentations does not say your waiting earns anything. It says God is good to you while you wait. Isaiah does not say the blessing comes after. It says you are blessed now. Psalm 27 does not promise the outcome; it promises you will be held up. And Hebrews flatly admits that some people never got the thing — and refuses to treat them as failures.
That is a smaller promise than the slogan and an enormously kinder one. It cannot be falsified by your Tuesday. If you are in a long season of waiting, this may help more than a proverb will.
And it is worth noticing that the two poets who actually wrote this line down knew all of it. Longfellow carved it under a dead falcon. Fane said it to make herself glad and then admitted that things come too late. The people closest to the saying were the least confident about it. It was the rest of us, centuries later, who smoothed it into a guarantee.
So, is it in the Bible?
No. “Good things come to those who wait” is a proverb, not a verse — French before it was English, four hundred years old before anyone attached the word good to it.
What the Bible offers instead is not a promise that the good thing is on its way. It is a promise that you are not waiting alone, and that the waiting itself is not evidence against you. If you have been quoting the proverb for years, you were reaching for something real. It was just in Lamentations the whole time, said better.
A short prayer for a long wait
God, I do not know when this ends, and I have stopped pretending I do. Be good to me here, in the middle, where nothing has arrived yet. Strengthen my heart today, and let that be enough for today.
Let’s talk
What is the longest you have ever waited for something — and what actually helped you keep standing? And is there another saying you grew up believing was in the Bible that you are now not so sure about? Tell us in the comments.
Questions people ask about “good things come to those who wait”
Is “good things come to those who wait” in the Bible?
No. “Good things come to those who wait” is not in the Bible, in those words or any close variation. It is a proverb whose oldest written form is French, from the 1500s. The nearest real verse is Lamentations 3:25, which says something different: “The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.” That verse promises God’s goodness to the waiting person, not a good outcome at the end of the wait.
Where does “good things come to those who wait” come from?
“Good things come to those who wait” comes from a much older proverb. The oldest traced form is the French “Tout vient à point qui peut attendre”, documented in sixteenth-century writers by the scholar A. Delboulle in the journal Romania in 1884. Longfellow printed “All things come round to him who will but wait” in 1863, and the poet Violet Fane quoted “All things come to those who wait” in 1872. The familiar “good things” wording became globally known as a Guinness advertising slogan in Britain from 1998.
Who said “all things come to those who wait”?
Nobody knows who first said “all things come to those who wait”, and the common answer is wrong. Violet Fane is usually credited with it, but in her poem “Tout vient à qui sait attendre” — printed in From Dawn to Noon in 1872, not 1892 — she put the line in quotation marks and wrote that it “has been said by one who knew”. She was quoting a proverb that was already old. The earliest written examples found by scholars are French and date to the 1500s.
What does the Bible say about waiting?
The Bible says a great deal about waiting, but it promises company and strength rather than a guaranteed outcome. Psalm 27:14 says, “Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart.” Isaiah 30:18 says “blessed are all they that wait for him” — in the present tense, while the waiting is still going on. Isaiah 40:31 promises renewed strength. And Hebrews 11:13 says of the heroes of faith that they “all died in faith, not having received the promises.”
Does the Bible promise that waiting will be rewarded?
Not in the way the saying suggests. The Bible never treats waiting as a payment that earns a reward. Habakkuk 2:3 does say of one specific promise, “though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come” — but the verse first calls it “an appointed time”, appointed by God rather than reached by waiting hard enough. And Hebrews 11:13 openly says some faithful people died without receiving what they were promised, and honours them anyway.
Share this
- I always thought “good things come to those who wait” was a Bible verse. It is a 1500s French proverb, and the “good things” bit came from a beer advert. The actual verse says God is good to you while you wait. That is a much better promise.
- TIL the poet credited with “all things come to those who wait” was quoting someone else — and her poem ends “they come, but often come too late.” We kept the hopeful half and binned the honest one.
- Longfellow’s version of “all things come to those who wait” is carved under a wooden falcon, in a story where the waiting killed the bird and a child died anyway. Nobody who wrote this line down was being cheerful about it.
