Daily Inspiration Quote by E. T. A. Hoffmann

A proverb dressed in lace and lit by candlelight, Hoffmann's line warns that style can't launder a bad bargain. "Dancing with the devil" isn't just a melodramatic image; it's social choreography. You choose a partner, enter the circle, and suddenly you're onstage in a ritual that looks voluntary even when it isn't. That's the trap: complicity can feel like elegance. The "prettiest capers" suggests virtuosity, cleverness, even moral self-confidence - the belief that you can outspin consequences through charm, talent, or a well-timed flourish. Hoffmann, ever suspicious of appearances, punctures that fantasy. Once you've accepted the music, the steps are no longer yours.

The subtext is almost bureaucratic in its severity: the deal, not the performance, determines the outcome. It's an early critique of what we'd now call reputation management. You can curate an image, refine your rhetoric, perfect your role, but you can't reverse the underlying alignment. The line also carries a Romantic-era anxiety about modern life: the intoxicating lure of artifice, salons, and spectacle - worlds where the aesthetic can masquerade as the ethical.

Context matters because Hoffmann lived amid Napoleonic upheaval and wrote fiction obsessed with doubles, enchantments, and the porous boundary between reality and performance. As a critic and satirist of bourgeois self-deception, he implies that the most dangerous evil doesn't arrive roaring; it arrives waltzing, offering you the chance to look brilliant while you surrender the plot.