make one's bed and lie in it

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Idioms and Phrases

Suffer the consequences of one's actions. For example, It's unfortunate that it turned out badly, but Sara made her bed and now she must lie in it . The earliest English citation for this oft-repeated proverb is in Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia (c. 1590): “Let them . . . go to their bed, as themselves shall make it.” The idiom alludes to times when a permanent bed was a luxury, and most people had to stuff a sack with straw every night for use as a bed. There are equivalents in French, German, Danish, and many other languages.

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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