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“This too shall pass” is four words people reach for when nothing else fits. It gets said at hospital bedsides and typed into WhatsApp at midnight. It gets tattooed on wrists and engraved inside bracelets. A lot of Christians assume it is a Bible verse, and it is easy to see why – it sounds like one, and it gets said in the places Bible verses get said.
Almost always, it is said to someone who is hurting. That is how we use it now: as a promise that the bad part will end.
But the old story behind this saying was built to do two jobs, not one. And the half that quietly fell away over the years is the half that tells you what the saying is really about.
What “this too shall pass” actually promises
Read it slowly. It does not say “this will get better.” It says “this will not last.” Those are two different promises.
If you are in pain, it is true, and it helps. Pain changes. Grief changes shape. The worst week of your life does end.
Now look at the small word in the middle. Too. “This too” means this, like everything else. And everything else includes the good things. The wedding day. The healthy years. The child who is still small enough to carry.
So “this too shall pass” is not really a promise of comfort. It is a promise of change. It tells a sad man that his sorrow will not last. It tells a happy man exactly the same thing, in exactly the same words.
Here is our reading of it: the saying is honest, and it is thinner than it sounds. It guarantees that this moment will end. It says nothing about what comes next. And it says nothing at all about whether anything lasts.
That gap turns out to be the most interesting thing about it – because the people who first carried this saying into English noticed the gap too.
It sits in the same drawer as “God won’t give you more than you can handle” and “everything happens for a reason” – sayings we reach for when we love someone and have run out of words. The difference is that this one is true. It just is not the whole truth.
Where “this too shall pass” comes from
Nobody has found a first page. The honest answer to “who said it first?” is: no one we can name with confidence.
Quotation researchers such as Ralph Keyes, in The Quote Verifier (2006), trace the saying back through Jewish folklore to medieval Persian poetry. The Persian Sufi poets Sanai and Attar of Nishapur are the names most often given. In Jewish tellings the words are gam zeh ya’avor, and the king in the story is usually Solomon.
The versions differ, but the shape holds. A powerful king asks his wise men for one sentence that will be true at every moment of his life. They give him a ring with the answer on it. In some tellings, the ring has a strange power: it makes a sad man happy, and a happy man sad.
That second half is the part we lost. And the English-speaking world’s own record shows how central it used to be.
Walter Scott used it about Napoleon (1813)
On 6 November 1813, the Scottish novelist Walter Scott wrote a long, chatty letter from his home at Abbotsford to the poet Lord Byron. A few weeks earlier, Napoleon’s army had been beaten at the battle of Leipzig. The most powerful man in Europe was starting to fall.
Scott mused on it. “From the highest to the lowest,” he wrote, “we are the fools of fortune.” Then he reminded Byron of an old eastern tale: a Sultan asked Solomon for an inscription for a signet ring, one that would be “at once proper for moderating the presumption of prosperity and comforting the pressure of adversity.” The answer, Scott wrote, was the words “And this also shall pass away.”
Notice which half Scott reached for. He was not comforting anyone. He was watching an emperor lose everything, and he used the saying as a warning to the proud.
FitzGerald’s two-line version (1852)
In 1852 – seven years before his famous English version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám came out in 1859 – the poet Edward FitzGerald published a small book of sayings called Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances. Under the heading “Solomon’s Seal,” he told the whole story in two lines:
“The Sultan asked Solomon for a Signet motto, that should hold good for Adversity or Prosperity. Solomon gave him, ‘This also shall pass away.'”
Adversity or prosperity. Both again.
Abraham Lincoln told it – and then argued with it (1859)
On 30 September 1859, a year before he was elected president, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Milwaukee to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society – a crowd of farmers at the state fair. Near the end, he told the story:
“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction!”
Pride comes first in his list. Comfort comes second.
And then Lincoln did something almost nobody remembers. He pushed back. “And yet let us hope it is not quite true,” he said. He hoped that good work – on the land, and in the mind and heart – could build a kind of prosperity “which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”
Lincoln loved the saying. He just could not let it be the last word. He went looking for something that would not pass away.
Put those three tellings side by side – Scott, FitzGerald, Lincoln – and the pattern is plain. In every one, the saying cuts both ways, and the warning to the happy is at least as important as the comfort to the sad. Somewhere between then and now, we kept the comfort and let the warning go.
Is “this too shall pass” in the Bible?
No. “This too shall pass” is not a verse in the King James Version, and it is not a quotation from any book of the Bible. The ring story is not in the Bible’s account of King Solomon either. Solomon was attached to it later, in folk tellings, because he was the Bible’s great symbol of wisdom and wealth.
But the idea behind it is very much in the Bible. In fact, the Bible holds the oldest version of it we have – and, unlike the ring, it does not stop where the ring stops.
A lot of people who find out a favourite saying is not in the Bible want to see for themselves what actually is. If that is you, we will send you the whole Book of Matthew free – a readable PDF and a 28-chapter audiobook.
The line the ring leaves out
Long before any Persian poet, the book of Ecclesiastes opened by calling everything hevel – a Hebrew word for breath, or vapour. The King James Version translates it “vanity.” One generation goes, another comes. Nothing you can hold stays held. It is “this too shall pass,” written out at the length of a whole book.
Here is a small, strange detail. In the very paragraph where Walter Scott quoted the ring, he also described Napoleon as a “pitcher” that had gone to the fountain too often and might finally be “broken.” Peter Cochran, who edited the Byron-Scott letters, points out that the picture comes from Ecclesiastes 12:6 – the book’s image for a life coming to its end. The ring and the Preacher were sitting side by side in Scott’s head.
That is the real lineage of this saying. People keep arriving at the same place. The Preacher did. The Persian poets did. Scott did, watching an emperor fall. Lincoln did, speaking to farmers at a fair. Everything passes. Every generation has to be told again.
But the ring stops there. Lincoln felt it stop. “Let us hope it is not quite true,” he said, and he went looking for something that “shall not pass away.”
Those exact words already had a home. In Matthew 24, Jesus’ disciples point out the great buildings of the temple in Jerusalem – the most permanent-looking thing any of them had ever seen. He tells them that not one stone will be left standing on another. It is the ring’s warning to the happy man, spoken in front of the grandest building they knew. And then, a little later in the same answer, comes the line the ring never had:
“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” (Matthew 24:35)
Same verb. Same phrase Lincoln reached for. We cannot know whether Lincoln had that verse in mind – he did not say. But it is the missing half of the sentence. The ring tells you everything passes. This names what does not.
And that changes how the old saying feels on both kinds of days. If the thing that lasts was never your circumstances, then a hard season ending is not just luck, and a good season ending is not the end of everything.
So is “this too shall pass” still worth saying?
Yes. It is true, and when it is said gently to someone hurting, it is one of the kindest true things we have. If you are in the middle of a season that will not lift, we wrote about how to get through a hard season of life you cannot fix.
But the ring was made to be worn on good days too. Its forgotten use may be its best one: a quiet word to yourself on the day everything is going right. Hold this lightly. It is a gift, not a possession.
And on the hard days, it is half a sentence. The other half is the question the ring was never able to answer – the one Lincoln asked out loud in 1859. If this too shall pass, what doesn’t?
Over to you
Which do you need more often right now – the ring’s comfort on a hard day, or its warning on a good one? And which other sayings have you always assumed were somewhere in the Bible? Tell us in the comments.
Share this
“I always used ‘this too shall pass’ as comfort. Turns out the old ring story was meant for good days too – it was supposed to humble the happy king as much as cheer up the sad one.”
“Abraham Lincoln told the ‘this too shall pass’ story in 1859 – and then said ‘let us hope it is not quite true.’ He wanted something that would not pass away. I had no idea he argued with it.”
“‘This too shall pass’ isn’t in the Bible. But Matthew 24:35 uses the same words and adds the part the saying leaves out: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.'”
Questions people ask
Is “this too shall pass” in the Bible?
No. “This too shall pass” is not a verse in the King James Version and is not a quotation from any book of the Bible, and the story of King Solomon’s “this too shall pass” ring is folklore rather than scripture. The idea, though, runs all through the Bible. Ecclesiastes 1:4 says “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 says “the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” And Matthew 24:35 adds the part the saying leaves out: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”
What does “this too shall pass” mean?
“This too shall pass” means that no situation – good or bad – is permanent. Today it is mostly said as comfort to someone going through a hard time. But in the old ring story it comes from, the words were chosen because they were true at every moment of a king’s life: they were meant to humble him when he was proud and happy, as much as to console him when he was sad. The saying promises change, not improvement.
Who first said “this too shall pass”?
No one can name the first person who said “this too shall pass.” Quotation researchers trace it through Jewish folklore, where it appears as gam zeh ya’avor and is usually linked to King Solomon, back to medieval Persian Sufi poetry – the poets Sanai and Attar of Nishapur are most often named. In English, Walter Scott told the story in a letter to Lord Byron on 6 November 1813, Edward FitzGerald printed it as “Solomon’s Seal” in his 1852 book Polonius, and Abraham Lincoln told it in a speech in 1859.
What did Abraham Lincoln mean by “this too shall pass”?
Abraham Lincoln told the “this too shall pass” story on 30 September 1859, in a speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee. He praised the words – “And this, too, shall pass away” – as “chastening in the hour of pride” and “consoling in the depths of affliction,” meaning they could humble the successful and comfort the suffering. But he then disagreed with them: “And yet let us hope it is not quite true.” Lincoln hoped that good work on the land and in people’s minds and characters could build a prosperity that “shall not pass away.”
Is it “this too shall pass” or “this too will pass”?
Both are used, and they mean the same thing. “This too shall pass” is the most common modern wording, and “this too will pass” is a frequent variation. Older English versions usually add a word at the end: Walter Scott wrote “And this also shall pass away,” Edward FitzGerald printed “This also shall pass away,” and Abraham Lincoln said “And this, too, shall pass away.” People also sometimes write it as “this shall too pass,” but “this too shall pass” is the standard form.
