“Fortune favours the bold” holds that luck tends to fall to those willing to take a risk. The person who acts, who presses forward instead of hesitating, gives fortune something to work with; the timid, by contrast, forfeit the opportunity before it arrives. It is used to encourage a decisive move, and sometimes to justify one after the fact. The word “bold” is often swapped for “brave,” with little change in sense.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘fortune favours the bold’?
The idea is one of the oldest recorded proverbs in Latin, and the Romans treated it as a saying already worn smooth by use. It appears in Terence’s comedy Phormio, first staged in 161 BC, where the slave Geta urges the young Antipho to stay alert: “fortis fortuna adiuvat,” fortune helps the brave. The most quoted version comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 10, line 284, where the warrior Turnus rallies his men against the landing Trojans with the words “Audentis Fortuna iuvat,” fortune favours the daring. The two Latin verbs, “adiuvat” and “iuvat,” both mean helps or aids rather than the softer “favours” of the modern English, and “audentis” carries the sense of daring rather than mere courage.
Related Latin forms circulated widely. The dramatist Ennius, writing in the century before Virgil, had already put the sentiment as fortune being given to brave men, and later writers kept returning to it. By the time of Cicero the phrase was being cited as an old proverb, which is a fair sign that no single author invented it.
In English the thought is present well before the fixed wording settled. Chaucer gives it in Troilus and Criseyde, written around 1385, where Pandarus tells Troilus: “Thenk eek Fortune, as wel thy-selven wost, / Helpeth hardy man to his enpryse, / And weyveth wrecches, for hir cowardyse.” A few years later, around 1390, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis has the line “Fortune unto the bolde / Is favorable forto helpe.” The now-standard phrasing hardened over the following centuries, with “fortune favours the brave” recorded in the eighteenth century and the “bold” variant equally established, both of them plain translations of a proverb the Romans had themselves inherited.