Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Matt Haig

58. “That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”

— Matt Haig

59. “Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up. Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up. Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up. Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.”

— Matt Haig

60. “You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

62. “Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. 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

63. “You have the power to stop time. You do it by kissing. Or listening to music.”

— Matt Haig

64. “Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.”

— Matt Haig

65. “We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’ ‘You know Thoreau?”

— Matt Haig

66. “Most gossip is envy in disguise.”

— Matt Haig

67. “Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don’t quite understand the joke that is themselves.”

— Matt Haig

68. “Living with anxiety, turning up, and doing stuff with anxiety takes a strength most people will never know.”

— Matt Haig

69. “It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.”

— Matt Haig

70. “Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.”

— Matt Haig

71. “Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.”

— Matt Haig

72. “We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”

— Matt Haig

73. “Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful.”

— Matt Haig

74. “I’m sorry,′ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For the past and the future.’ An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.”

— Matt Haig

75. “And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.”

— Matt Haig

76. “This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.”

— Matt Haig

77. “Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am trying.”

— Matt Haig

78. “Advice for a human 86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.”

— Matt Haig

79. “Reading is love in action.”

— Matt Haig

80. “To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”

— Matt Haig

81. “I felt the beautiful melancholy of being human, captured perfectly in the setting of a sun. Because, as with a sunset, to be human was to be in-between things; a day, bursting with desperate colour as it headed irreversibly towards night.”

— Matt Haig

82. “Einstein said the way to understand relativity was to imagine the difference between love and pain. “When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.”

— Matt Haig

83. “It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn’t know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn’t see?”

— Matt Haig

84. “This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.”

— Matt Haig

85. “You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful.”

— Matt Haig

86. “She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before. She heard Mrs Elm’s voice, from under the table somewhere far behind her, cutting through the noise. ‘Don’t give up! Don’t you dare give up, Nora Seed!’ She didn’t want to die. And she didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers.”

— Matt Haig

87. “And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. 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.”

— Matt Haig

88. “Where talk exists, so does hope.”

— Matt Haig

89. “Accept. Don’t fight things, feel them. Tension is about opposition, relaxation is about letting go.”

— Matt Haig

90. “A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another.”

— Matt Haig

91. “If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.”

— Matt Haig

92. “Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.”

— Matt Haig

93. “Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can’t escape from.”

— Matt Haig

94. “Don’t let anyone or anything make you feel you aren’t enough.”

— Matt Haig

95. “Tragedy is just comedy that hasn’t come to fruition. One day we will laugh at this. We will laugh at everything.”

— Matt Haig

96. “When looking at triggers for mental health problems, therapists often identify an intense change in someone’s life as a major factor.”

— Matt Haig

97. “Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.”

— Matt Haig

98. “Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”

— Matt Haig

99. “Why depression is hard to understand IT IS INVISIBLE. It is not “feeling a bit sad.”

— Matt Haig

100. “Which is to say: don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.”

— Matt Haig