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Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
This too shall pass
A well-loved line with no biblical source.
The saying traces to medieval Persian Sufi poets (Rumi, Sanai, and Attar of Nishapur all carry versions of it), attached to a folk legend about a ring commissioned by a powerful king to contain words that would make him happy when sad and humble him when proud. Jewish retellings of the same legend often cast Solomon in the story, sometimes as the king who receives the ring's lesson, sometimes as the sage who hands it down, which is likely exactly why the line feels biblical even though it isn't one.
It reached English readers through the poet Edward FitzGerald (best known for translating the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam), who included a short retelling of the Persian fable in his 1852 collection Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances. Abraham Lincoln is also frequently credited with popularizing it in an 1859 address, quoting it as an "Eastern monarch's" proverb, again pointing back to the same Persian folk source, not to Scripture.
