The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (588 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs
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What goes UP must come down
Commonly associated with wartime bombing and anti-aircraft shrapnel.
1929
Stretchers
vii.
The antiaircraft guns always took a shot for luck.What goes up must come down, and one can be killed quite as neatly by a fragment of his own shrapnel as by the enemy's.
1949
Naked & Dead
III
. vi.
Gravity would occupy the place of mortality (what goes up must come down)
1967
Epigrams at Large
57
‘What goes up, must come down’ is really a time-worn statement which wore out after the Venus and Mars probes.
1991
Times
9 Sept. 18
Our descent is swift, in plunging abseils… [for] the Old Man [of Hoy; a rock pinnacle in the Orkney islands] and Sir Isaac Newton share a common law; that what goes up must irrevocably come down.
fate and fatalism

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