{"id":118514,"date":"2026-10-10T08:55:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T12:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=118514"},"modified":"2026-10-10T08:55:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T12:55:10","slug":"is-good-things-come-to-those-who-wait-in-the-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-answers\/is-good-things-come-to-those-who-wait-in-the-bible\/","title":{"rendered":"Is “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait” in the Bible?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>14 Minute, 1 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n

No. “Good things come to those who wait” is not in the Bible.<\/strong> The words do not appear anywhere in it \u2014 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<\/em> in it became famous through a beer advert in the 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where “good things come to those who wait” actually comes from<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The trail is longer than you would expect, and it changes shape at every step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1500s, in French.<\/strong> The oldest form anyone has traced is “Tout vient \u00e0 point qui peut attendre.”<\/em> In 1884 a French scholar named A. Delboulle wrote a short note on this proverb in the journal Romania<\/em> (volume 13, pages 425\u2013426<\/a>). He said plainly that he had no examples of it older than the sixteenth century, and he listed the writers who used it then \u2014 among them the poet Cl\u00e9ment Marot, the proverb collector Gabriel Meurier, and the French dictionary of Oudin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two things about that old French line are worth slowing down for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It says peut<\/em> \u2014 “can” \u2014 not sait<\/em>, “knows how to”. The modern French version, the one everybody says now, is “to the one who knows how<\/em> to wait”. The old one was humbler. It was about being able<\/em> to wait, which is a very different thing when you have no choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it contains the words \u00e0 point<\/em> \u2014 “in good time”, “at the right moment”. The old proverb was not a promise about what<\/em> arrives. It was an observation about when<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1863, in Massachusetts.<\/strong> Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published Tales of a Wayside Inn<\/em>, and one of its stories, “The Falcon of Ser Federigo”, ends with the line: “All things come round to him who will but wait.”<\/em> You can read it yourself in the full text of the book<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1872, in London.<\/strong> Search for the origin of this saying online and you will almost always be told it was coined by the English poet Violet Fane \u2014 the pen name of Mary Montgomerie Lamb, later Lady Currie \u2014 in a poem called “Tout vient \u00e0 qui sait attendre”, usually dated to around 1892.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is wrong twice, and the real version is better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>, published in London by Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1872<\/strong>. The scanned book is free to read online<\/a>, title page and all. It was reprinted in her two-volume Poems<\/em> in 1892, which is probably where the later date came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.”<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then look at how her poem ends:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ah, “All things come to those who wait”
(I say these words to make me glad),
But something answers soft and sad \u2014
“They come, but often come too late!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 her heart turning towards him after his had turned away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1996, in an advertising pitch.<\/strong> The word good<\/em> 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<\/a> with a pitch built around it, and the first advert in the campaign went out on 16 May 1998.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 the French, Longfellow’s, Fane’s \u2014 says all things<\/em> or everything<\/em>. Not good things<\/em>. Somewhere between a sixteenth-century proverb about timing and a twentieth-century slogan about beer, “everything arrives eventually” quietly became “nice things are coming”.<\/p>\n\n\n