Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Grace, for Hazlitt, isn’t a social polish you paste on; it’s a leak. The body gives away the state of the inner life, and when the soul is in tune, the person moves through the world with an ease that can’t be faked. That’s the sly pressure inside the line: it demotes etiquette from a skill to a symptom. If you have to manufacture grace, you’ve already conceded the lack of harmony.

The definition works because it reverses a common hierarchy. “Outward expression” suggests something visible, public, and judgeable; “inward harmony” names something private and moral-psychological. Hazlitt ties them together like cause and effect, quietly insisting that aesthetics and ethics share a circulatory system. It’s also a critic’s maneuver: he’s training you to read human behavior the way you read art, as form revealing feeling. Grace becomes a kind of honest style.

Context matters. Hazlitt writes in a Romantic era that’s newly obsessed with sincerity, individuality, and the idea that the self is the primary text. At the same time, Britain is thick with class signaling: refinement, deportment, “good breeding.” Hazlitt, perpetually suspicious of cant and social pretension, offers a definition that flatters the democrat in him. Real grace isn’t inherited or coached; it’s the byproduct of internal coherence. The subtext is moral but not pious: your gestures betray you. Even your elegance can testify against you.