Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Grace, for Hazlitt, isn’t an added flourish; it’s an erasure. The line has the clean, slightly severe logic of a critic who mistrusts ornament and cares about effect: what reads as effortless is often the product of ruthless subtraction. By defining grace as an "absence", he shifts attention away from a performer’s intention (to impress) and toward the audience’s experience (to never be reminded of labor). Pain, difficulty, hesitation, incongruity: each word is a tell, a seam that shows the garment was stitched.

The intent is diagnostic. Hazlitt is sketching a standard for judging art, manners, even thought itself: grace is coherence without visible strain. The subtext is a little ruthless about human display. If you can see the effort, the effort becomes the meaning, and the spell breaks. He’s describing an aesthetic of concealment, where the highest skill is to hide the cost of skill.

Context matters: Hazlitt writes out of the Romantic era’s obsession with authenticity and feeling, yet he refuses to equate sincerity with clumsiness. The era celebrated passion; Hazlitt insists that passion must be shaped so it doesn’t look like work. There’s also a social edge: "grace" is the currency of those trained not to reveal need. In that sense, the definition doubles as cultural critique: grace isn’t innocence, it’s discipline - a performance so well managed it passes as nature.