Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

58. “Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. Bruce Lee.”

— Matt Haig

59. “Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

— Matt Haig

60. “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

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

— Matt Haig

62. “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

63. “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

64. “There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can.”

— Matt Haig

65. “In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.”

— Matt Haig

66. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

69. “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”

— Matt Haig

70. “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

71. “So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading. 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.”

— Matt Haig

72. “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

73. “That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.”

— Matt Haig

74. “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

75. “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

76. “Don’t ever be afraid of telling someone you love them. There are things wrong with your world, but an excess of love is not one.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

79. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

82. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own nonupgraded existence.”

— Matt Haig

90. “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

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

— Matt Haig

92. “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

93. “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

94. “Reading is love in action.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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