fortune favours the bold
Luck tends to go to the person willing to take the risk.
“Just ask her out. Fortune favours the bold.”
“She applied for the senior post two years early on the theory that fortune favours the bold, and got an interview.”
“Fortune favours the bold is excellent advice for anyone who can afford to be wrong, and the people repeating it most confidently are usually the ones who can.”
The line is Virgil's: audentis Fortuna iuvat, Fortune helps the daring, spoken by Turnus in the tenth book of the Aeneid. Terence had used a close version well over a century earlier — fortis fortuna adiuvat — so the sentiment was already proverbial when Virgil gave it its permanent form.
Fortuna was a goddess with temples and festivals, not a figure of speech, and the Romans imagined her as actively picking sides. That makes the claim stronger than the English translation suggests: it is not that bold people happen to get lucky, but that luck itself is watching and prefers nerve.
Both audaces and audentes appear in later quotation, and English carries the idea in half a dozen forms — fortune favours the bold, the brave, the daring — all of them used to talk somebody into acting.
Hannibal, Pyrrhus, and the strategy Rome used on everyone else.
- 01
Hannibal at the gates (idiom)
A threat so close and so serious that everything else stops mattering.
Hannibal in Italy, 218–203 BC.
- 02
a Pyrrhic victory (idiom)
A win that costs so much it feels almost like a defeat.
Pyrrhus beats Rome and loses anyway.
- 03
divide and conquer (idiom)
To keep opponents from uniting so that each can be dealt with separately.
How Rome handled the defeated.
- 04
si vis pacem, para bellum (idiom)
If you want peace, prepare for war — the argument that strength is what prevents attack.
Vegetius on why armies train.
- 05
casus belli (idiom)
The event a side points to as its justification for going to war.
The paperwork of a just war.
- 06
semper fidelis (idiom)
Always faithful — a pledge of loyalty that does not expire.
The soldier's oath.
Last updated August 3, 2026