# fortune favours the bold

idiom · CEFR B2

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/fortune-favours-the-bold
Updated: 2026-08-03

## Meaning

Luck tends to go to the person willing to take the risk.

## Examples

- 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.

## Origin

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.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.