Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

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

— Matt Haig

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Matt Haig

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

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

— Matt Haig

39. “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

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

— Matt Haig

41. “What is depression? Its like a tornado, theres nothing you can do but sit and wait, and finally when the storm is over... you are left with the destruction. The scars on your body, the puffy eyes from crying, the exhaustion from fighting a losing battle. It’s consuming.”

— Matt Haig

42. “To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”

— Matt Haig

43. “Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.”

— Matt Haig

44. “A society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.”

— Matt Haig

45. “The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.”

— Matt Haig

46. “People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.”

— Matt Haig

47. “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

48. “And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on. – Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”

— Matt Haig

49. “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

50. “If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.”

— Matt Haig