The saying offers reassurance to anyone in the middle of grief or heartbreak: that the sharpness of a loss will dull, and that feelings which seem unbearable now will grow easier to carry as the weeks and years go by. The “wounds” are figurative, standing for sorrow, betrayal, or bereavement rather than physical injury. It is usually said in comfort, though people also use it wryly, since the promise that pain simply ebbs away with the calendar is one that not everyone finds true.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘time heals all wounds’?
The idea behind the proverb is very old. That grief lessens with time is a thought found across classical and medieval writing, and the notion is so widespread that no single author can be credited with inventing it. A version is often attributed to the Greek comic poet Menander, along the lines of “time is the healer of all necessary evils,” but this attribution is repeated mainly by quotation collections rather than by the surviving fragments, and some sources assign a similar line to the poet Diphilus instead. Because the wording cannot be tied to a confirmed passage, it is safest to treat the Menander credit as traditional rather than established.
What can be verified is that the modern English wording is comparatively recent. The exact phrase “Time heals all wounds” appears in H. Rider Haggard’s novel Morning Star, published in 1910, spoken as a greeting between two long-estranged brothers: “We quarrelled long ago, did we not, and many years have passed since we met, but Time heals all wounds and, welcome, son of my father.”
The closely related form “time is a great healer” is recorded in print at almost the same moment. It appears in Percy F. Westerman’s The Rival Submarines of 1913: “Time is a great healer, Mr. Hythe; but the reminiscences of my early struggles with fate cannot be easily erased.” The magazine Punch used it the following year, in 1914: “Time is a great healer, but twelve years is not long enough,” a line that already plays on the proverb sceptically.
Taken together, the record suggests that the sentiment is ancient but the fixed English phrasing is a product of the early twentieth century, crystallised out of a much older stock of sayings about grief wearing away with time. The two dominant forms, “time heals all wounds” and “time is a great healer,” settled into common use within a few years of each other. Grief’s other consolatory proverb, ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, works the same territory from the opposite direction.