"It is nearly always the most improbable things that really come to pass"
About this Quote
The line turns probability on its head. What our models, habits, and cautious reason dismiss as unlikely is precisely what arrives at the door. Spoken by E. T. A. Hoffmann, a jurist, composer, and master of German Romanticism, it distills a worldview that resists the Enlightenment faith in tidy causality. Romantic art insists that the marvelous leaks into the everyday; the world is not a clean mechanism but a stage where coincidence, dream, and the uncanny erupt.
Hoffmanns tales make this creed visible. In The Sandman, a student mistakes an automaton for a woman and love curdles into horror. In The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, toys awaken and a living room becomes a battlefield. The Devil’s Elixirs threads lives together through impossible coincidences and doubles. Such events would be shrugged off as not only improbable but impossible, yet the stories turn on their arrival. Hoffmann writes within a tradition in which the novella centers on an unerhoerte Begebenheit, an unprecedented occurrence that forces a reordering of perception.
The aphorism also reads as a cool observation about life outside fiction. History is shaped by black swans, from Napoleons unlikely rise and fall in Hoffmanns own era to scientific breakthroughs sparked by accidents and pandemics that redraw the map of daily life. On a human scale, friendships, loves, and vocations often hinge on stray encounters or trivial delays. What seems unlikely in advance can be almost inevitable in retrospect, once hidden conditions or vast numbers of trials are acknowledged. The law of truly large numbers ensures that rare constellations appear somewhere; our minds notice them only when they touch us.
The sentence counsels humility before contingency and an openness to wonder. It does not merely glorify surprise; it warns that reality keeps more possibilities in play than reason expects. Art, for Hoffmann, trains the imagination to meet those arrivals without denial or despair.
Hoffmanns tales make this creed visible. In The Sandman, a student mistakes an automaton for a woman and love curdles into horror. In The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, toys awaken and a living room becomes a battlefield. The Devil’s Elixirs threads lives together through impossible coincidences and doubles. Such events would be shrugged off as not only improbable but impossible, yet the stories turn on their arrival. Hoffmann writes within a tradition in which the novella centers on an unerhoerte Begebenheit, an unprecedented occurrence that forces a reordering of perception.
The aphorism also reads as a cool observation about life outside fiction. History is shaped by black swans, from Napoleons unlikely rise and fall in Hoffmanns own era to scientific breakthroughs sparked by accidents and pandemics that redraw the map of daily life. On a human scale, friendships, loves, and vocations often hinge on stray encounters or trivial delays. What seems unlikely in advance can be almost inevitable in retrospect, once hidden conditions or vast numbers of trials are acknowledged. The law of truly large numbers ensures that rare constellations appear somewhere; our minds notice them only when they touch us.
The sentence counsels humility before contingency and an openness to wonder. It does not merely glorify surprise; it warns that reality keeps more possibilities in play than reason expects. Art, for Hoffmann, trains the imagination to meet those arrivals without denial or despair.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
|---|
More Quotes by T. A. Hoffmann
Add to List
