Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line flatters women while quietly judging the society that appraises them. “Beauty” is the obvious currency: immediate, visual, easily ranked. “Grace,” though, is a more slippery form of power. It suggests movement, tact, social intelligence, self-command - qualities that can’t be captured in a single glance and therefore can’t be owned as easily by the gaze evaluating them. Hazlitt is arguing that what lasts, what persuades, is not the static fact of attractiveness but the lived performance of character.

The phrasing “has more effect” is telling. He doesn’t claim grace is more moral, more authentic, or even more “true.” He treats it like force: a social technology that changes rooms, reorders attention, calms egos, invites trust. That’s the critic’s eye: less interested in ideals than in what works on people. The subtext is almost Machiavellian. If beauty is a lottery ticket, grace is a skill - and skills travel across time, class settings, and shifting standards of taste.

Placed in Hazlitt’s late-18th/early-19th century context, the remark also betrays a world where women’s influence is often indirect. When formal power is blocked, “grace” becomes a sanctioned route to agency: a way to matter without appearing to compete. Modern readers can feel both the compliment and the constraint. Hazlitt elevates grace, but he also reinforces the expectation that women should be legible as pleasing, composed, and socially adept - even as he admits that such composure can outplay mere prettiness.