این نیز بگذرد
Īn nīz bogzarad This also shall pass Nothing — neither joy nor suffering — lasts.
A king asks his wise men for a single sentence — one that will be true in every circumstance, in triumph and in ruin, at the feast and at the funeral. They bring him a ring. On it are four words: این نیز بگذرد. This too shall pass. The king puts it on and discovers that the motto works exactly as promised, which means it is as cruel as it is kind. At the feast, it whispers that the feast will end. At the funeral, it whispers that the grief will lift. The sentence cannot be argued with. It can only be worn.
The story has been attributed to Solomon, to Attar of Nishapur, to anonymous Sufi dervishes, and to Abraham Lincoln. It belongs to none of them and to all of them, which is, if you think about it, the proverb demonstrating itself.
What it means
Three words in Persian — four in English — and the grammar does no more work than it has to. این (īn): this. نیز (nīz): also, too. بگذرد (bogzarad): shall pass. There is no subject more specific than this, which is precisely the point. The word does not name the sorrow or the joy; it names the present moment, whatever that moment contains, and pronounces it temporary.
What makes the phrase unusual among proverbs of consolation is that it refuses to take sides. Most patience proverbs comfort the suffering: hang on, it will get better. This one also warns the comfortable: enjoy it, because it won’t stay. The ring is not a bandage. It is a levelling instrument — a spirit level for the soul, if you are willing to let it work in both directions.
Where it comes from
The earliest Persian attestations trace to the Sufi poets of the twelfth century. Sanai of Ghazna, writing around 1131, and Attar of Nishapur, a generation later, both circulate versions of the ring fable. Attar’s telling is the fullest: a powerful king summons his assembled sages and demands a ring that will make him happy when he is sad. The sages deliberate and return with a plain band inscribed این نیز بگذرد. The ring delivers what was asked — in sadness the king reads it and feels consoled — but it also delivers what was not asked, because in happiness the king reads it and feels chastened. The commission was for comfort. What the sages built was something more demanding: a device that undercuts every certainty, including the certainty of relief.
The story migrated. Jewish folklore recast the king as Solomon, sometimes as the one who receives the ring, sometimes as the one who inscribes it. The Hebrew form, גַּם זֶה יַעֲבֹר (gam zeh ya’avor), carries the same grammar and the same sting. Many versions have been recorded by the Israel Folklore Archive at the University of Haifa. In some, the phrase is further compressed to the three-letter acronym גַּזֶיַ — gimel, zayin, yodh — as if the truth is so well known it only needs initials.
By 1839 the fable had appeared in American newspapers, usually starring a nameless “Eastern monarch.” Edward FitzGerald gave it the title “Solomon’s Seal” in 1852. And on September 30, 1859, Abraham Lincoln retold it to a crowd at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, adding his own coda: “How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction!” Then Lincoln, characteristically, pushed back against the ring. “And yet let us hope it is not quite true,” he said. “Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us … we shall secure a prosperity and happiness … which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.” It is a remarkable moment: Lincoln quoting the proverb, admiring it, and then refusing it — insisting that some human achievements ought to be permanent.
How it gets used today
The phrase circulates in Persian as a proverb, a tattoo, a caption, a consolation offered between friends. In modern Iranian speech, این نیز بگذرد is the thing you say after a loss — a job, a relationship, a political hope — but also, more quietly, the thing you murmur to yourself when something is going almost too well, as a small insurance against the pride that invites collapse. The bidirectionality is not theoretical. Persians use it in both directions, and the ability to do so — to comfort yourself and chasten yourself with the same four words — is part of what makes the phrase feel like wisdom rather than platitude.
Cousins from other tongues
The shared claim is that the present state is not the permanent state. But each tradition chooses a different posture toward that truth — and the posture is where the temperament shows.
The Mandarin 塞翁失馬，焉知非福 — “the old man of the frontier lost his horse; how do you know this is not good fortune?” — reaches the same conclusion through narrative rather than inscription. The old man’s horse disappears and the neighbours grieve; the horse returns with a wild stallion and the neighbours celebrate; the son rides the stallion, breaks his leg, and the neighbours grieve again; a war comes and the lame son survives. Each reversal proves the previous judgment wrong. Where the Persian ring states the principle as a motto — compact, portable, wearable — the Chinese version performs it, unfolding the oscillation across time until the listener gives up trying to call any single event good or bad. The ring is a conclusion. The parable is a demonstration. And the emotional register differs: the Persian phrase carries a note of Sufi melancholy, a sense that transience is the deepest truth about the world. The Chinese version is drier, almost comic in its mechanical reversals, as though the universe is running a pedagogical experiment on the neighbours.
The Hausa proverb duk dare ya yi tsawo, gari zai waye — “however long the night, the dawn will break” — takes the comforting half of the ring’s motto and commits to it fully. There is no warning about prosperity here, no chastening in the hour of pride. The night is suffering, the dawn is its end, and the proverb’s only business is to promise that end. It is a one-directional version of “this too shall pass” — the half you reach for when someone is in pain. What gets lost is the other edge, the one that pricks the comfortable. A Sufi would notice the absence. The Hausa proverb is a bandage; the Persian ring is a mirror.
Boethius, imprisoned in Pavia around 524 CE, awaiting execution on charges he believed were false, wrote the Consolation of Philosophy and gave the Latin West its most enduring image for the same observation: Rota Fortunae, the Wheel of Fortune. The goddess Fortuna spins her wheel; the king at the top descends; the beggar at the bottom rises. The wheel became a medieval icon — painted into manuscripts, carved into cathedral floors, dealt into tarot decks. What Boethius and the Persian sages share is the conviction that the current position tells you nothing about the next one. But where the ring is intimate — a private inscription, read by one person — the wheel is mechanical and public. No one chooses to be on it. No one controls the spin. The ring at least implies agency: you can read the inscription and adjust your inner state. The wheel offers no such comfort. You are strapped to it. The only wisdom is to stop believing that the top is better than the bottom — and Boethius, who wrote this while waiting to die, was not entirely sure he believed it himself.
Why it matters
The phrase has outlived every king who wore the ring. It has passed through Persian, Hebrew, Turkish, English, and a dozen other languages without losing its edge or its tenderness. Perhaps that is because it is not, finally, advice. It does not tell you what to do. It tells you what is true — and then it lets you sit with the truth, which is the harder thing.
Somewhere a ring is being turned on a finger, and the person turning it is not sure whether to be comforted or frightened by what it says. That uncertainty is the whole teaching.