Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be brave. Be strong. Breathe, and keep going. You will thank yourself later.”

— Matt Haig

2. “Don’t worry about things you can’t control.”

— Matt Haig

3. “Dark matter is needed to hold galaxies together. Your mind is a Galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile.”

— Matt Haig

4. “An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand yet.”

— Matt Haig

5. “Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.”

— Matt Haig

6. “Everyone has a limit – a point at which they can’t take any more – and, almost out of nowhere, I had reached mine.”

— Matt Haig

7. “The only way to learn is to live.”

— Matt Haig

8. “Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.”

— Matt Haig

9. “The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.”

— Matt Haig

10. “Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.”

— Matt Haig

11. “You can’t choose where you are born, you can’t decide who won’t leave you, you can’t choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.”

— Matt Haig

12. “It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”

— Matt Haig

13. “There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.”

— Matt Haig

14. “Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.”

— Matt Haig

15. “Advice for a human. 81. You can’t find happiness looking for the meaning of life. Meaning is only the third most important thing. It comes after loving and being. 82. If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.”

— Matt Haig

16. “Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.”

— Matt Haig

17. “To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid any more.”

— Matt Haig

18. “Be humble because you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars. Serbian proverb.”

— Matt Haig

19. “Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it.”

— Matt Haig

20. “The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them.”

— Matt Haig

21. “That’s the odd thing about depression and anxiety. It acts like an intense fear of happiness, even as you yourself consciously want that happiness more than anything.”

— Matt Haig

22. “The bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view.”

— Matt Haig

23. “All that humans create serves solely to lessen the terror of existence.”

— Matt Haig

24. “Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with the world, and to change our own and other people’s lives.”

— Matt Haig

25. “You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”

— Matt Haig

26. “But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love.”

— Matt Haig

27. “If, as Schopenhauer said, “we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people,” then love – at its best – is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.”

— Matt Haig

28. “Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”

— Matt Haig

29. “Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”

— Matt Haig

30. “The longer you live, the more you realize that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realize their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their world views challenged and disproved. Everyone would realize the thing that defines a human being is being a human.”

— Matt Haig

31. “THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy.”

— Matt Haig

32. “It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the rain.”

— Matt Haig

33. “It never rains forever. And know that, however wet you get, you are not the rain. You are not the bad feelings in your head. You are the person experiencing the storm. The storm may knock you off your feet. But you will stand again. Hold on.”

— Matt Haig

34. “Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.”

— Matt Haig

35. “There is no rejection, there is only redirection.”

— Matt Haig

36. “Don’t be a perfectionist. Humans are imperfect. Human work is imperfect. Be less robot, more human. Be more imperfect. Evolution happens through mistakes.”

— Matt Haig

37. “Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.”

— Matt Haig

38. “If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming...”

— Matt Haig

39. “Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through.”

— Matt Haig

40. “Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.”

— Matt Haig

41. “Mental health is intricately related to the whole body. And the whole body is intricately related to mental health. You can’t draw a line between a body and a mind any more than you can draw a line between oceans.”

— Matt Haig

42. “The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.”

— Matt Haig

43. “You shouldn’t have been born. Your existence is as close to impossible as can be. To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.”

— Matt Haig

44. “I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”

— Matt Haig

45. “So, as physical health and mental health are intertwined, couldn’t the same be said about the modern world? Couldn’t aspects of how we live in the modern world be responsible for how we feel in the modern world?”

— Matt Haig

46. “You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.”

— Matt Haig

47. “I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don’t know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren’t. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.”

— Matt Haig

48. “In all chaos there is a cosmos,” said Carl Jung, “in all disorder a secret order.”

— Matt Haig

49. “Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.”

— Matt Haig

50. “You need to be uncomfortable. You need to hurt. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

— Matt Haig