Somewhere in nearly every Afghan household lives a sentence of four words: īn nīz bogzarad — this too shall pass. It is offered in grief and whispered in joy, and it carries a philosophy far older than the household that speaks it. This entry documents the proverb's meaning, its grammar, its roots in the Sufi poetry of Khorasan — the world of Ghazni and Balkh — and the long journey by which a Persian consolation became one of the most quoted sayings on earth.
When it is said
A family receives terrible news. The room is quiet, tea is poured, and an elder — usually the one who has lost the most in their own lifetime — says it almost under their breath: īn nīz bogzarad. No one treats it as a platitude. It lands with the weight of someone who has watched hard seasons end.
What an outsider misses is that the same words are spoken at the height of celebration — at a wedding, at a homecoming, at good fortune. Said in sorrow, it is consolation. Said in joy, it is humility. The proverb cuts both ways by design, and an Afghan ear hears both edges at once: do not despair, and do not become proud, for nothing — neither the wound nor the crown — is permanent.
A philosophy in four words
The proverb compresses a worldview the culture holds deeply: that time is a river, that suffering and splendor are both travelers, and that the dignified posture before fate is sabr — patience that is not passivity but endurance with grace. It is the same understanding that runs through the poetry Afghans hold closest: that loss and beauty are not opposites but companions, and that a people who have survived much do not survive by pretending permanence — they survive by outlasting.
Said in sorrow, it is hope. Said in joy, it is humility. It is the same sentence, because time is the same river.
This is why the proverb has never read as pessimism in the Afghan mouth. To a people whose modern history has demanded extraordinary endurance, this too shall pass is not resignation — it is the oldest promise in the language: that no winter has yet failed to end.
The words themselves
this
also, too (the literary register; everyday speech would say ham)
shall pass, from gozashtan, to pass, to cross, to let go.
Two details reward attention. The verb gozashtan means both to pass and to forgive, to let go — so the proverb carries a quiet second instruction beneath the first. And the choice of nīz over the everyday ham marks the sentence as literary: even in casual speech, the proverb arrives dressed in the register of the poets, a four-word visitor from the written tradition — though, as the variants above show, daily Afghan speech has long since tailored it to its own cloth.
The king, the ring, and the poets of Khorasan
The proverb comes wrapped in a story. A powerful king charges his wise men with an impossible commission: a sentence that will be true in every circumstance — one that will sober him in triumph and console him in despair. They return with a ring, and engraved upon it: this too shall pass.
The earliest tellings of this tale belong to the Persian Sufi tradition of Khorasan — the very world the House's story begins in. Versions appear in the poetry of Sanā'i of Ghazni1 — the pioneer of the Sufi masnavi, born in what is now Afghanistan — and in the works of Attār of Nishapur, the perfumer-poet whose telling fixed the tale in Persian literature. Rumi of Balkh inherited this same lineage; the meditation on impermanence that fills the Masnavi is the proverb's philosophy at epic length. The saying is, in a precise sense, a distillate of the Sufi thought of greater Khorasan — the intellectual world whose eastern heart lay in the cities of present-day Afghanistan.
From Persian it traveled. European writers retold the "Eastern king" fable through the nineteenth century — until it reached the most unexpected of tellers.
"An Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: And this, too, shall pass away."
Lincoln called the words chastening in the hour of pride and consoling in the depths of affliction — a fair translation, across seven centuries and half the world, of exactly what an Afghan elder means by them over tea. A sentence forged in the Sufi poetry of Khorasan had crossed into the mouth of the man who would hold a nation together — carrying the same double edge it has always carried.
Variations & living use
A living proverb is never uniform. These notes record usage as it is gathered; they will grow as the community contributes.
How this entry was made
When did someone say it to you — and did it help?
This record grows from memory. Tell us who in your family says it, when it is said, and what it carried. Verified accounts become part of the Canon, credited to those who carry them.
Contribute what you knowSources & further reading.
- Attār of Nishapur. Persian Sufi poetry, 12th–13th c. — tellings of the king-and-ring fable in the masnavi tradition.
- Sanā'i of Ghazni. Hadiqat al-Haqiqa. Ghazni, 12th c. — the pioneering Sufi masnavi; the tradition's eastern root in present-day Afghanistan.
- Lincoln, Abraham. Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, September 30, 1859 — the "Eastern monarch" retelling.
- House of Afghanistan. Community testimony archive, oral submissions, 2026– (primary source).
1 Sanā'i of Ghazni (d. c. 1131): the poet who pioneered the Sufi masnavi form later perfected by Attār and Rumi. His city, Ghazni, stands in present-day Afghanistan — see the Rumi entry for the fuller lineage.