This article is about the adage. For other uses, see This too shall pass (disambiguation).
“This too shall pass” (Persian: این نیز بگذرد, romanized: īn nīz bogzarad) is a Persian adage translated and used in several languages. It reflects on the temporary nature, or ephemerality, of the human condition — that neither the bad, nor good, moments in life ever indefinitely last. The general sentiment is often expressed in wisdom literature throughout history and across cultures, but the specific phrase seems to have originated in the writings of the medieval Persian Sufi poets.
It is known in the Western world primarily due to a 19th-century retelling of Persian fable by the English poet Edward Fitz Gerald. It was also notably employed in a speech by Abraham Lincoln before he became the sixteenth President of the United States.
When an Eastern sage was desired by his sultan to inscribe on a ring the sentiment which, amidst the perpetual change of human affairs, was most descriptive of their real tendency, he engraved on it the words:
And this, too, shall pass away.” It is impossible to imagine a thought more truly and universally applicable to human affairs than that expressed in these memorable words, or more descriptive of that perpetual oscillation from good to evil, and from evil to good, which from the beginning of the world has been the invariable characteristic of the annals of man, and so evidently flows from the strange mixture of noble and generous with base and selfish inclinations, which is constantly found in the children of Adam.
