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This too shall pass


"This too shall pass" (Persian: این نیز بگذرد‎, translit. īn nīz bogzarad‎) is originally a Persian adage reflecting on the temporary nature, or ephemerality, of the human condition. The phrase seems to have originated in the writings of the medieval Persian Sufi poets, and is often attached to a fable of a great king who is humbled by the simple words. The general sentiment is often expressed in wisdom literature throughout history and across cultures. It also appears in a collection of tales by the English poet Edward Fitzgerald in the early 19th century. It was also notably employed in a speech by Abraham Lincoln before he became the sixteenth President of the United States. Fitzgerald's usage of the phrase is in the context of a retelling of a Persian fable. Some versions of the fable, beginning with that of Attar of Nishapur, add the detail that the phrase is inscribed on a ring, which has the ability to make the happy man sad and the sad man happy.

An early English citation of "this too shall pass" appears in 1848:

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 appliable 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.


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