In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

This line is best known from the King James Bible as part of God’s pronouncement to Eve after the Fall in Eden. Following the eating of the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3), God addresses the serpent, the woman, and the man with consequences that shape human life outside paradise. To the woman, the text links childbirth and maternal experience with pain and “sorrow,” presenting it as a divinely decreed condition of postlapsarian existence. Because it is scriptural, the saying is often treated as “anonymous” in quotation collections, though its origin is a specific biblical verse rather than an unattached proverb.

The statement frames childbirth as inseparable from suffering, casting reproductive life as marked by vulnerability, bodily pain, and emotional burden. In its biblical setting it functions etiologically—explaining why labor is painful—and theologically—depicting suffering as a consequence of disobedience and exile from Eden. In later usage, the line can be invoked more broadly to suggest that creation, nurture, and new beginnings often arrive through hardship. It has also been central to debates about gender, authority, and the moral meaning assigned to women’s bodies, since it ties a specifically female experience to a narrative of punishment and human fallenness.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

“In pain you shall bring forth children.”
“In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.”
“I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy conception; in pain thou shalt bring forth children.”