"It is nearly always the most improbable things that really come to pass"
About this Quote
Hoffmann’s line reads like a shrug from someone who has watched the world ignore its own rules and then act surprised when the impossible shows up on schedule. “Nearly always” is the tell: he’s not offering mystical certainty, he’s making a critic’s wager based on experience. Reality, he implies, doesn’t reward the tidy mind. It rewards the plot twist.
As a Romantic-era writer and critic steeped in the uncanny, Hoffmann knew how “improbable” works as both aesthetic and diagnosis. In his fiction, the unbelievable is rarely mere spectacle; it’s the moment when rational explanations fail and the self’s hidden machinery takes over - obsession, desire, paranoia, the unconscious. So the quote isn’t just about freak accidents or long odds. It’s about how the improbable becomes inevitable when you account for what polite logic edits out.
There’s also a sly jab at the Enlightenment confidence that the world can be fully mapped. Hoffmann lived through revolutions, Napoleonic upheaval, and the churn of early modern bureaucracy - an era when history itself felt like a series of implausible turns delivered at scale. The line doubles as a critique of “reasonable” forecasts: the more confident the system, the more spectacular the blind spot.
What makes it work is its tonal balancing act. It sounds like common sense while smuggling in a worldview: expect the strange, because the strange is often the truest register of how people and societies actually behave.
As a Romantic-era writer and critic steeped in the uncanny, Hoffmann knew how “improbable” works as both aesthetic and diagnosis. In his fiction, the unbelievable is rarely mere spectacle; it’s the moment when rational explanations fail and the self’s hidden machinery takes over - obsession, desire, paranoia, the unconscious. So the quote isn’t just about freak accidents or long odds. It’s about how the improbable becomes inevitable when you account for what polite logic edits out.
There’s also a sly jab at the Enlightenment confidence that the world can be fully mapped. Hoffmann lived through revolutions, Napoleonic upheaval, and the churn of early modern bureaucracy - an era when history itself felt like a series of implausible turns delivered at scale. The line doubles as a critique of “reasonable” forecasts: the more confident the system, the more spectacular the blind spot.
What makes it work is its tonal balancing act. It sounds like common sense while smuggling in a worldview: expect the strange, because the strange is often the truest register of how people and societies actually behave.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
|---|
More Quotes by T. A. Hoffmann
Add to List
