“This too shall pass”

Origin

The earliest documented form of “This too shall pass” is a Persian fable retold by medieval Sufi poets. In the story, a king asks his sages for a saying that will be true in every circumstance — joyful or sorrowful. The sages return with the line that has come down in English as “This too shall pass.”

The English-language popularisation runs through two well-known nineteenth-century figures:

• Edward FitzGerald included a version of the fable in Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances (1852).
• Abraham Lincoln referenced the saying in an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society on September 30, 1859: “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.’”

It is sometimes attributed in modern usage to Solomon, but this attribution does not appear in any biblical text or in any pre-modern source connecting the saying to him.

Why the misattribution persists

The phrase has biblical-sounding cadence and concerns a theme — the transience of human circumstance — that Scripture does discuss. Several Bible passages express related ideas (see “What the Bible does say”), and the resemblance has led some readers to assume the phrase itself is biblical.

What the Bible says on this theme

Several biblical passages describe the impermanence of human circumstance. They are listed above. None of them contains the phrase “this too shall pass.”