This Too Shall Pass — 75 Uplifting Quotes to Help You Actually Believe That on the Hard Days

Sofia had been navigating a year that had asked more of her than she thought she had available. A health scare that had resolved but left residue. A work situation that had not resolved and was still difficult every day. A relationship that was strained in ways that were hard to name and harder to fix. She had been managing it one day at a time. On one particular Tuesday she ran out of management capacity.

She was at her desk at 2 PM, staring at a task she could not begin, feeling the weight of the whole year pressing on the Tuesday afternoon. A colleague noticed and asked, without making it a big thing, how she was doing. Sofia said she was just going through something. Her colleague wrote the Churchill quote on a Post-it note and put it on her desk: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Sofia laughed. It was the first time she had laughed in several days. Not because the quote was funny — it was not trying to be funny. Because it was so accurate. She was in fact going through hell. The instruction was to keep going. That was the whole instruction. Not to fix it. Not to understand it. Not to resolve the year or the health or the work or the relationship. Just to keep going. She kept going. The year did eventually resolve. But the Tuesday was better for having the four words on a Post-it.

I have kept that Post-it. It is on my fridge now. There is something about the instruction that strips away all the things you think you are supposed to do on a hard day — understand it, fix it, feel better about it. You do not have to do any of those things. You just have to keep going. Churchill said it because he knew it from experience. It works because it removes the requirement to feel okay. You just have to move. That is all. Keep going.

Marcus did not think of himself as a quotes person. He found most of them too easy, too pat, too removed from the actual experience of difficult things. He had been having a hard month professionally — a project that had not gone the way he had planned, a conversation with his manager that had gone worse, a general sense of being slightly behind where he thought he should be.

His daughter was eight years old. He was reading Anne of Green Gables to her at bedtime. They were not far into it. On the fourth night of reading, they came to the line: “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” His daughter looked at him and said: “That’s really good, Dad.”

Marcus said he had to stop reading for a moment. Not because he was emotional in a dramatic way. Because the line had landed in a way that was specifically useful. The day had been a day of mistakes. He had made the wrong call in the project. He had said the wrong thing in the meeting. He had been, in his own assessment, wrong in several specific ways that had consequences. And tomorrow was a new day with none of them in it yet. He had not thought of it that way. His eight-year-old had been right. It was really good.

I was not reading it as a self-help book. I was reading it to my daughter. And the line arrived at exactly the right moment because I was not prepared for it. Most of the quotes I had encountered before came to me when I was looking for them. This one arrived in the middle of a bedtime routine on a hard Tuesday and it landed because I was not braced against it. That might be the secret of the best quotes — they find you when you are not defending yourself against them. Tomorrow was a new day with no mistakes in it yet. I went to sleep with that. The next day was better.