Daily Inspiration Quote by Eugene Ionesco

Ionesco’s line lands like a joke and then curdles into diagnosis. “You can only predict things after they have happened” is a neat self-contradiction that exposes how prediction often works in public life: as retroactive storytelling dressed up as foresight. It’s not just that humans are bad at forecasting; it’s that we crave the comfort of patterns so much we’re willing to fabricate them after the fact, then call that fabrication “sense.”

As a dramatist of the Absurd, Ionesco wrote in the long hangover of World War II and the ideological certainties that sold it. In that context, the quote reads less like a throwaway paradox and more like an indictment of the experts, officials, and true believers who announce inevitability once the rubble is already smoking. The line skewers the way causality gets reverse-engineered: first the event, then the confident narrative about why it had to happen, who saw it coming, and what it “means.”

The subtext is a warning about language itself. Prediction is supposed to be a forward-looking act; Ionesco suggests it’s frequently a linguistic trick that turns contingency into destiny. That trick is politically useful. If outcomes were “predictable,” then they were also unavoidable, and someone is conveniently off the hook.

What makes the sentence work is its deadpan economy: a single temporal flip that makes our post-hoc certainty look ridiculous. It’s comedy with teeth, aimed at the human need to pretend the world is legible, even when it’s just loud.