c. 1190 CE · Attar of Nishapur · Persian Sufi Poetic Tradition
“This too shall pass.”
Historical Attestation: In niz bogzarad (این نیز بگذرد)
Often reduced to a greeting-card sedative for hard times, the original Persian fable designed this four-word sentence as a double-edged mirror for both ecstasy and despair.
Treated as a polite minimization of acute sorrow—an impatient reminder that current grief is temporary and therefore unworthy of full attention.
In its original Sufi context, the phrase was forged not merely to console the miserable, but to humble the triumphant: a radical equalizer of all temporal states.
“Look at the ring in both seasons: in agony, let it promise that no winter is permanent; in triumph, let it whisper that every feast is borrowed time.”
The Forgotten Origin
In the twelfth-century Persian poet Attar of Nishapur's chronicle, a powerful monarch summoned his wisest scholars and demanded a single inscription for his signet ring that could rescue him from despair in defeat, yet immediately sober his ego in moments of supreme victory. The sages returned with four words in Persian: In niz bogzarad—'This too shall pass.'
When Abraham Lincoln recounted the fable in Milwaukee in 1859, he marveled at its symmetrical architecture: 'How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!' Modern usage has amputated the first half of the proverb, turning a philosophical gyroscope into a one-sided sedative.
Philological & Etymological Lineage
3 Historical Strata“این نیز بگذرد (In niz bogzarad)”
Engraved on a ring for a king who asked his sages for a motto that would make him happy when sad, and sad when happy.
“This too will pass away.”
Introduced the Persian Solomon-and-ring parable into Victorian English letters.
“And this, too, shall pass away.”
Lincoln praised the adage as 'chastening in the hour of pride, and consoling in the depths of affliction.'
The Conceptual Weight Beneath the Surface
At its core, 'This too shall pass' is an ontological statement about impermanence—what Buddhist philosophy calls anicca and Heraclitus called panta rhei ('everything flows'). We suffer doubly when we mistake a weather pattern of the soul for the permanent climate of our existence.
Yet when applied to joy as well as sorrow, impermanence does not cheapen experience; it intensifies it. Because the sunlit afternoon is already passing, it demands our undivided reverence. Because the dark night is also passing, it cannot claim sovereignty over our identity.
Why the Mind Reaches for This Phrase
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's research on 'affective forecasting' demonstrates that human beings systematically overestimate the duration and intensity of future emotional states—a cognitive bias known as 'immune neglect.' In crisis, the brain projects current pain infinitely forward.
Invoking temporal transience restores perspective to the autobiographical self, reminding the nervous system that emotions are wave-like physiological events with a rising phase, a crest, and an inevitable subsidence.