“A gale does not last all morning, nor a downpour all day” appears in Chapter 23 of the Dao De Jing. The following lines ask: if even intense events made by Heaven and Earth cannot endure, how much less can human forcing? Within the chapter’s discussion of naturalness and sparing action, the weather is an analogy for the limits of sustained excess.
The sentence need not be turned into the reassurance that every hardship will quickly pass. A storm ending does not repair its damage. A more restrained modern reading is that intensity is not duration, and immediate force is not stable capacity. To judge something well, watch whether it can continue when conditions change.
https://ctext.org/dao-de-jing/ens
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