To take the good with the bad is to accept both the negative and positive sides of something, rather than expecting one without the other. It is typically said as a reminder that nothing is perfect, and that a person, a job, a marriage or a situation will bring its share of disappointments alongside its benefits, and both have to be lived with. The phrase is used to counsel patience or resignation, often when someone is tempted to focus only on what is wrong and ignore what is working.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘take the good with the bad’?
The phrase has no single traceable coining or famous first use. It belongs to the broad stock of English proverbial sayings that pair opposites, good and bad, for better and for worse, which have circulated in everyday speech for so long that no particular author or text can be credited with them. The word “bad” itself is old: it is first recorded in Middle English, between 1200 and 1250, as “badde” or “bad”, though its ultimate origin before that point is uncertain.
There is a view, aired on at least one language blog rather than in any dictionary or scholarly source, that “take the bad with the good” is the older and more traditional ordering, and that the now-more-common “take the good with the bad” is a later reversal of it. That claim comes from an informal commentator rather than an established reference, and it is not corroborated elsewhere, so it should be treated as a personal observation rather than a settled fact. Both orderings are certainly in use today, and native speakers tend to reach for whichever one comes to mind first, without any sense that one is more correct than the other.
Because the phrase is built from ordinary words in a simple grammatical pattern, that is, “take X with Y”, it is the kind of expression that could have arisen independently many times over, wherever people wanted a short way of saying that life, or a particular situation, cannot be enjoyed selectively. No dictionary records a specific first use of the saying in either order, and none is likely to be found.