Daily Inspiration Quote by Hector Hugh Munro

A neat little act of sabotage disguised as a compliment. Munro, better known as Saki, flips the moral proverb "beauty is only skin deep" into "sin deep", turning a pious reassurance into a smirking indictment. The joke lands because it refuses the comforting separation between surface and character. In Saki's world, the surface is the character, and the character is frequently awful in an entertaining way.

The intent is less to sneer at beauty than to puncture the Victorian-Edwardian fantasy that refinement signals virtue. By making "sin" the depth at which beauty operates, Saki suggests that what society calls attractive is often what it privately rewards: appetite, manipulation, narcissism, the thrill of transgression carried off with good tailoring. It's not that beautiful people are wicked by nature; it's that beauty can be a passport that lets wickedness move through drawing rooms unchallenged, even celebrated.

The subtext is class critique with a poisoned needle. Saki wrote in an era obsessed with manners as moral theater, when cruelty could be rendered invisible by wit and status. His stories are full of exquisitely mannered predators and cheerfully demolished certainties. The line performs that same trick: it delivers a clean epigram while leaving a smudge on the listener's conscience.

"Always say" is its own little tell, too: a rehearsed stance, a social weapon. The cynicism isn't incidental; it's the point. Saki isn't offering wisdom. He's showing how easily "wisdom" becomes an accessory.