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Someone says it at a hospital bedside. Someone writes it in a card when they cannot think of anything else to write. It is stitched on cushions and printed on mugs: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
The line is credited to Julian of Norwich, a woman who lived in England in the 1300s. That credit is right, as far as it goes. The words are in her book. But she never claimed them as her own. She wrote that she heard them, lying in bed, on a night when she expected to die.
That changes the sentence. A promise that all shall be well sounds one way on a mug. It sounds another way coming out of a plague city, to a sick woman of thirty, in answer to the hardest question she had.
What “all shall be well” is actually claiming
Start with what the line does not say. It does not say all is well. Every verb in it points forward. Julian’s present was a sickroom. The promise is about a future she could not see.
Now notice that it is said three times, and that the third time is wider than the first two. “All shall be well” becomes “all manner of thing shall be well.” Julian noticed this herself. In a later chapter she writes that one time the Lord said “all thing shall be well,” and another time “thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well,” and that she took the two sayings differently. The second one, as she understood it, reached the things that look impossible to bring to any good end. The heading of that chapter in Grace Warrack’s 1901 translation puts it plainly: there are deeds done in our sight, and harms taken, so great that “it seemeth to us that it were impossible that ever it should come to good end.”
So here is our reading. The line is not a claim that bad things are secretly fine. It is a claim that nothing is out of reach of being made well. Not one thing. Not the worst thing. That is a much bigger promise than optimism, and a much harder one.
And here is what it leaves out, on purpose: how. Julian says so directly. Of the way God will make all things well, she writes that “there is no creature beneath Christ that knoweth it, nor shall know it till it is done.” The quote stops at the promise, and so did she. People who repeat it today sometimes use it as if it explained something. It never did. It is a promise without a mechanism, offered to someone who had asked for the mechanism and been given this instead.
The sickbed in May 1373
Almost everything we know about Julian comes from her own book, and she tells us very little. We do not know her real name. “Julian” is most likely taken from the church of St Julian in Norwich, where she later lived as an anchoress, a woman enclosed for life in a small cell built against the church wall. She calls herself “a simple creature unlettered.” The earliest outside record of her is a will from 1394 that leaves twelve shillings to “Julian anakorite.”
What she does tell us is the illness. She writes that when she was “thirty years old and a half,” God sent her a bodily sickness. She lay three days and three nights. On the fourth night she “took all my rites of Holy Church,” the last rites, “and weened not to have lived till day.” She did not expect to see morning. Then, over the following hours, with a crucifix held in front of her face, she saw a series of visions she called Showings. There were sixteen in all.
Scholars even disagree on the day. The old copies of her book have been read as giving both the eighth and the thirteenth of May 1373. Historians put her birth around 1342 or 1343, which means she was a small child, about six, when the Black Death reached Norwich in 1349. The historian Janina Ramirez estimates it may have killed more than half the city’s people, and that it came back in further waves across Julian’s lifetime. She grew up in a city that had buried most of its neighbours, and then she nearly died herself.
She recovered. She wrote a short account soon after, and then spent decades, perhaps twenty years or more, writing the long version, eighty-six chapters of it. She was still alive in her seventies when another woman, Margery Kempe, came to her cell around 1413 for advice. That is nearly the whole biography.
If you have read our piece on what John Donne was living through when he wrote “no man is an island”, you will recognise the pattern. The famous comfort lines are so often written by sick people, from bed.
The sentence before it, which nobody quotes
The famous line is an answer. The question matters.
Julian writes that for a long time before her illness she had been troubled by one thing. In Warrack’s translation: “afore this time often I wondered why by the great foreseeing wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted: for then, methought, all should have been well.”
Read that last clause again. Then all should have been well. She is saying: if God had never allowed sin to start, everything would have been fine. It is the oldest complaint there is, and she admits she made it “with mourning and sorrow.”
The reply, as she records it, takes her own words and turns them around. Warrack renders it: “It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Her “all should have been well” becomes “all shall be well.” The past-tense regret is handed back as a future-tense promise.
And the first half of that sentence is the part everyone drops. In the Middle English manuscript Warrack worked from, the line reads: “Synne is behovabil, but al shal be wel & al shal be wel & al manner of thyng shal be wele.” Other manuscripts spell the word “behovely.” It is an old word, and editors still argue over it. It sits somewhere between “necessary,” “fitting,” and “useful.” Sin is behovely: sin has some needful part to play. Only then: but all shall be well.
That is a far stranger and more honest sentence than the half we quote. It does not pretend the broken thing is not broken. It says the broken thing is inside the plan, and the plan ends well. Julian adds that the words “were said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me.” A few chapters later she hears the promise stacked four times over: “I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well, and I shall make all thing well.”
Alternate forms you will see online, “all will be well,” “all manner of things shall be well,” “everything shall be well,” are all paraphrases of this one passage.
Lost for three hundred years, then quoted in the Blitz
Here is a fact few people repeating the line know: almost nobody read it for three centuries.
Julian’s long text was not printed until 1670. The complete copies that survive are not from her lifetime at all. They were made in the 1500s and 1600s, mostly by English nuns living in exile on the continent. The short text was thought lost until a copy turned up in 1910. It was Grace Warrack’s translation of 1901, the one quoted in this article, that put the book in modern readers’ hands.
Then came the war. In 1942, T. S. Eliot took Julian’s phrases into “Little Gidding,” the last of his Four Quartets, among them “Sin is Behovely” and “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The poem had been begun during the air raids on London. In June of that same year, a German bomb struck St Julian’s church in Norwich, the church Julian’s cell had stood against. The cell itself had been pulled down long before, in the 1530s. After the war the church was rebuilt, and a small chapel was put up on the spot where the cell had been.
So the line went from a sickbed in a plague city, to three hundred years of near silence, to the mouth of a poet in a bombed capital, to the cushion on your sofa. That is the whole lineage, and almost no one who says it knows any of it.
One more thing, in fairness to her. Julian did not find the promise easy either. In the same part of the book she writes that she held to what the Church taught about those who die unrepentant, and that she could not see how that fitted with “all shall be well.” She does not pretend to solve it. Her answer is that God will do a “Great Deed” at the end of time, “treasured and hid in His blessed breast, only known to Himself,” by which all that is not well will be made well. Some readers have called her a universalist. She said she was not. She simply held both things and refused to let go of either. The tidy ending people want from the quote is the one thing its author would not give them.
The oldest person to ask her question
Julian’s question was not new in 1373. It is the question at the centre of the book of Job, one of the oldest questions in the Bible.
Job asks it from the ash heap, with his children dead and his skin covered in sores. Why was this allowed? He asks for chapter after chapter. He demands an explanation. And when God finally answers, the answer is famously not an explanation. It is a long run of questions about the sea and the stars and the morning. Job never learns why.
What he gets instead is a sight. Near the end, he says to God: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5, KJV). He asked for a reason. He was given a presence.
Now look at what Julian was given. She asked why sin had not been stopped. She did not get a reason either. She got a face, the crucifix held in front of her eyes, and a promise she was told plainly she would not understand until it was kept. Same question, two thousand years apart. Same shape of answer: not why, but who, and it will be.
We are not saying Julian was quoting Job. Warrack notes that Julian hardly quotes any book directly. That is what makes it worth noticing. Two people, far apart in time, place and language, bring the same complaint and are handed the same kind of reply. Humans have been asking why this was allowed for well over two thousand years, and the honest answers in both of these texts refuse to give a mechanism. They give a presence and a promise instead, and leave the how for later.
The line, read again
The next time someone hands you this sentence, or you find yourself handing it to someone else, you will know what you are holding.
You are not saying “it’s fine.” You are repeating what a thirty-year-old woman said she was told, on a night she expected to die, in a city that had lost most of its people, by someone who would not explain how. The sentence before it admits that the broken thing is really broken. The sentence after it does not pretend to know the way out.
That is a lot to carry in nine words. Most people who say it carry it without knowing. Now you know, and you can hold it a little more lightly, and a little more seriously, at the same time. If the day you are in needs something closer to hand, our Bible verse for how I feel tool was built for exactly that kind of moment.
A question for you
Which comfort saying have you always assumed came from the Bible, or from a particular person, without ever checking? We have looked at a few already, like “God doesn’t make mistakes”. Tell us yours in the comments, and we may dig into it next.
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I had no idea Julian of Norwich never claimed “all shall be well” as her own words. She wrote that she heard them, on a sickbed, expecting to die. Changes the whole line.
The full quote starts “Sin is behovely.” Nobody puts THAT on a mug. “All shall be well” was the second half of a sentence, not the whole thing.
“All shall be well” was written in a plague city by a woman who nearly died at thirty, went almost unread for 300 years, and was quoted by T. S. Eliot in the Blitz. I did not know any of that.
Questions and Answers
What did Julian of Norwich mean by “all shall be well”?
By “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” Julian of Norwich meant that nothing, not even the worst thing, is beyond being made well by God in the end. She did not mean that bad things are secretly fine. In her book she says the second phrase, “all manner of thing,” reaches the things that look impossible to bring to a good end. She also says openly that nobody knows how God will do this until it is done. The line is a promise about the future, not an explanation of the present.
Did Julian of Norwich say “all shall be well”?
Julian of Norwich wrote the words “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” but she did not present them as her own saying. In her book Revelations of Divine Love she records them as words Jesus spoke to her in a vision in May 1373, while she lay seriously ill and had received the last rites. So the line is correctly linked to her, but in her own account she is the one who heard it, not the one who said it.
Where does “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” come from?
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” comes from Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, an English anchoress who lived from about 1343 to after 1416. It appears in the thirteenth of her sixteen “showings,” in chapter 27 of the long version of her book, as the answer to her question about why God had allowed sin to begin. The visions happened in May 1373. The long text was not printed until 1670, and the English wording quoted here is Grace Warrack’s 1901 translation.
What is the full quote of “all shall be well” by Julian of Norwich?
The full sentence, in Grace Warrack’s translation, is: “It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” In the Middle English manuscript it reads “Synne is behovabil, but al shal be wel & al shal be wel & al manner of thyng shal be wele.” The first half, “sin is behovely,” is almost always left off when the line is quoted. “Behovely” is an old word meaning something like necessary or fitting.
Is “all shall be well” in the Bible?
No. “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” is not in the Bible. The words come from Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, written in England in the late 1300s, where she records them as spoken to her in a vision. The Bible contains promises in a similar spirit, but this exact sentence is Julian’s, and she did not claim it as a quotation from Scripture.
