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Who really said it

Time heals all wounds

Not Cicero — a proverb, oldest record by Terence Terence c. 195/185 – c. 159 BC · Roman comic playwright; earliest known to write the saying down
Disputed Free to reuse

No line matching the saying survives anywhere in Cicero, and in Tusculan Disputations Book III he grants that grief fades with time only to argue that the cure is daily reflection, not elapsed time. The oldest surviving record is Terence’s comedy Heauton Timorumenos (163 BC), where Menedemus quotes it as “that saying which I hear commonly repeated” and then flatly rejects it; the exact English wording came centuries later, from no identifiable author.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Time heals all wounds” not Cicero. It is an anonymous proverb. The oldest surviving record is Terence, Heauton Timorumenos (163 BC), Act III sc. 1, line 421, where the speaker quotes it as a commonplace and calls it false; Cicero in fact argued the opposite in Tusculan Disputations III.74. The exact English wording is earliest located in H. Rider Haggard's Morning Star (1910). Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Marcus Tullius Cicero. Use the credit shown above instead.

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In context

Evoking the world of Terence — Roman comic playwright, born in Carthage. Theme: "Time heals all wounds". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The oldest record: Terence, 163 BC

Work
Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor)
Passage
Act III, scene 1, line 421 — spoken by Menedemus
First produced
163 BC
Translation
Henry Thomas Riley, Perseus Digital Library edition

Assuredly I was either born with a disposition peculiarly suited for misery, or else that saying which I hear commonly repeated, that ‘time assuages human sorrow,’ is false. Act III, sc. 1

The Latin behind it is aut illud falsum est, quod vulgo audio dici, diem adimere aegritudinem hominibus — and quotation books have long lifted the final clause out on its own, translating it as “time heals all wounds.” Read whole, Menedemus is not endorsing the proverb. He is saying his grief over his absent son grows heavier by the day, and that the saying is a lie.

Terence, The Self-Tormentor, Act III scene 1 — Perseus Digital Library

How we checked

  • Wikiquote’s Cicero page ↗ lists “Time heals all wounds” in its Misattributed section, glossing it “Truly from Terentius, Heautontimorumenos, Act III, scene i.”
  • The Latin at Perseus confirms the line and its speaker: Menedemus, Heautontimorumenos III.1 ↗ — quod vulgo audio dici, “what I commonly hear said.” The saying was already old when Terence wrote it down.
  • Cicero took the other side. In Tusculan Disputations III he asks how grief can change if neither its cause nor the mourner has changed, and concludes that the remedy comes “from daily reflecting… and not from the length of time” (§ 74, trans. C. D. Yonge, 1877 ↗).
  • The exact four-word English form is modern. Phrases.org.uk ↗ locates its earliest printing in H. Rider Haggard’s novel Morning Star (1910), and the passage is there in the Project Gutenberg text ↗: “We quarrelled long ago, did we not… but Time heals all wounds.”
Public domain

Every text quoted on this page is out of copyright in the United States. Terence’s Latin is ancient; Henry Thomas Riley’s English rendering and C. D. Yonge’s 1877 Cicero are nineteenth-century; H. Rider Haggard’s Morning Star was published in 1910 — all comfortably before the 1931 threshold. The proverb itself has no identifiable author, so there is no one to hold a right in the four words.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Who it isn't

“Time heals all wounds” is a proverb, and proverbs attract famous names the way lightning finds a rod. Cicero is the usual host, but he is not the only bad address on this line.

Marcus Tullius Cicero Misattributed

Wikiquote’s Cicero page ↗ places the phrase in its Misattributed section and points to Terence instead. The credit is not merely unsupported, it is backwards: in Tusculan Disputations III Cicero holds that a remedy for grief comes “from daily reflecting that there is no real evil in the circumstance for which you grieve, and not from the length of time” (§ 74, trans. C. D. Yonge ↗).

Terence Out of context

Terence is the oldest source, but crediting him with the sentiment inverts his scene. Menedemus introduces the words as quod vulgo audio dici — what I commonly hear said — and immediately declares the saying false ↗, because his own sorrow grows heavier by the day.

Menander Unverified

Quote collections often push the thought back to Menander as “time is the healer of all necessary evils.” Phrases.org.uk ↗ cautions that this rests on quotation collections rather than surviving fragments, and notes that some sources credit Diphilus instead. Terence’s play was itself adapted from a Menander original ↗ now too fragmentary to check, so the trail genuinely runs cold.

Nobody coined it. Terence heard it as a commonplace in 163 BC and gave it to a character who calls it a lie; the earliest printing of the exact English wording that phrase historians have located is H. Rider Haggard’s Morning Star of 1910 (Phrases.org.uk ↗), where a Pharaoh offers it to the half-brother he once quarrelled with.

Context

Why Cicero is the wrong name in a particularly pointed way

The irony is hard to miss. Cicero is the name pinned to “time heals all wounds,” and Cicero is the ancient writer who most explicitly refused the idea. In Tusculan Disputations Book III he takes the claim apart on its own terms: if the cause of the grief is unchanged and the mourner is unchanged, why should mere elapsed time alter anything? His conclusion is that it does not — the cure is “daily reflecting that there is no real evil in the circumstance for which you grieve,” and not the length of time ↗.

There is a plausible route by which his name got attached anyway. The closest parallel anywhere in the Ciceronian corpus is nullus dolor est, quem non longinquitas temporis minuat ac molliat — there is no grief that length of time does not lessen and soften — and it sits in Epistulae ad Familiares 4.5 ↗. That letter is bound into Cicero’s collected correspondence, but Cicero did not write it: it is Servius Sulpicius Rufus writing to Cicero, consoling him on the death of his daughter. A sentence indexed under “Cicero, Letters” is one careless step from a sentence attributed to Cicero. That last step is our own observation, not a documented chain — but it is exactly the kind of slip this corpus invites.

The one Roman most often credited with the saying is the one who argued against it.

How the English wording actually formed

The thought is old and diffuse rather than authored. Menedemus already treats it as street wisdom in 163 BC, and Terence’s play was adapted from a lost Menander original ↗, so the saying may well have been Greek before it was Latin. What survives is a proverb already in circulation, not a first utterance.

In English it surfaces first as an image, not a formula. Chaucer’s Pandarus consoles Troilus with “As tyme hem hurt, a tymë doth hem cure” ↗ in Book V of Troilus and Criseyde — time as both the wound and the cure, which is the same idea entirely without the modern phrasing.

The fixed four-word form is recent by comparison. Its earliest located printing is 1910, in Haggard’s Morning Star; the near-variant “time is a great healer” turns up in Percy F. Westerman’s The Rival Submarines in 1913 and in Punch in 1914, according to Phrases.org.uk ↗. Nothing anywhere in that chain runs through Cicero.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Time Resilience Hope

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote — Marcus Tullius Cicero (Misattributed)en.wikiquote.org

Files “Time heals all wounds” under Misattributed and redirects it to Terence’s Heautontimorumenos, Act III scene i.
Perseus — Terence, The Self-Tormentor III.1perseus.tufts.edu

Henry Thomas Riley’s English text of the scene in which Menedemus quotes the proverb and calls it false.
Attalus — Cicero, Tusculan Disputations IIIattalus.org

C. D. Yonge’s 1877 translation, including § 74, where Cicero argues that reflection rather than elapsed time cures grief.
Phrases.org.uk — Time heals all woundsphrases.org.uk

Traces the fixed English wording to Haggard’s Morning Star (1910) and cautions that the Menander credit rests on quotation collections, not surviving fragments.
Project Gutenberg — Haggard, Morning Star (1910)gutenberg.org

The full public-domain novel containing the earliest located printing of the exact phrase, spoken by Pharaoh to his estranged half-brother Abi.
The Latin Library — Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares IVthelatinlibrary.com

Letter 4.5, the closest Ciceronian-corpus parallel — but written by Servius Sulpicius Rufus to Cicero, not by him.

The oldest record

Terence — who wrote it down, and then disowned it

Terence

c. 195/185 – c. 159 BC · Roman comic playwright, born in Carthage

Publius Terentius Afer was brought to Rome as a slave from Carthage, educated in his master’s household, and freed. Between 166 and 160 BC he wrote six comedies, all of which survive complete, most of them adapted from Greek originals by Menander — including Heauton Timorumenos, staged in 163 BC. His plain, conversational Latin made him a school text for centuries, which is precisely why his lines travelled so far from their contexts and were so easily reshelved under grander Roman names. He did not invent the idea that time heals: he set down a saying he already found commonplace, and handed it to a character who insists it is untrue.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Oldest documented source

Terence. Heauton Timorumenos [The Self-Tormentor], 163 BC. Act III, sc. 1, l. 421. Translated by Henry Thomas Riley. Perseus Digital Library. The exact English wording “Time heals all wounds” is earliest located in H. Rider Haggard, Morning Star (London: Cassell, 1910).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Time heals all wounds’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/time-heals-all-wounds/

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