Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line flatters reading without sanctifying it. “Books let us into their souls” is a critic’s way of naming the small miracle of print: an author’s interior life made portable, repeatable, and oddly intimate with strangers. The phrasing borrows the language of confession and exposure, but the punch is in the turn: they also “lay open to us the secrets of our own.” The real “soul” being accessed isn’t just the writer’s; it’s the reader’s, startled into visibility.

That reversal is the subtext of Hazlitt’s whole critical project. Writing in the wake of Romanticism, when “feeling” became a public currency and private identity a contested invention, Hazlitt treats literature less as moral instruction than as a technology of self-recognition. Books don’t simply give you new ideas; they give you new mirrors. You discover what you’ve been thinking all along but couldn’t quite articulate until a sentence arranged your emotions into a shape you could finally see.

There’s also a sly democratizing impulse here. “Secrets” suggests things we hide even from ourselves: jealousy, ambition, tenderness, cruelty. Hazlitt implies that reading doesn’t make you better by force; it makes you legible. That’s why the claim works rhetorically: it recruits the reader’s vanity (you have depths) while warning that those depths may be uncomfortable.

Coming from a critic, not a novelist, it’s also a professional credo. Hazlitt positions criticism and reading as a form of psychological literacy: the page is a meeting place where other people’s inner lives train you to catch your own in the act.