nothing new under the sun

1. A phrase adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes ; the author complains frequently in the book about the monotony of life. The entire passage reads, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Idioms and Phrases

Everything has been seen before, as in Those designs take me back to the 1950s—there really is nothing new under the sun . This world-weary view was already expressed in 1382 in the Bible translation attributed to John Wycliffe's followers: “No thing under the sun is new” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).