Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “As Hamlet said to Rosencrantz, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

— Matt Haig

103. “That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.”

— Matt Haig

104. “You can’t change the past. You can’t change other people. You can change you though. You narrate this story. So start to write a new chapter.”

— Matt Haig

105. “I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.”

— Matt Haig

106. “The rook is my favourite piece,’ she said. ‘It’s the one that you think you don’t have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.”

— Matt Haig

107. “Medication is an incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things.”

— Matt Haig

108. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.”

— Matt Haig

109. “The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased. So when you hear about someone killing themselves it’s important to know that death wasn’t any less scary for them. It wasn’t a ‘choice’ in the moral sense. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand.”

— Matt Haig

110. “I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realized the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit.”

— Matt Haig

111. “Don’t say yes to things you wish you had the confidence to say no to.”

— Matt Haig

112. “To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t.”

— Matt Haig

113. “Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack of everything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles nothing at all.”

— Matt Haig

114. “Yet people still don’t think depression really that bad. If they did, they wouldn’t say the things they say.”

— Matt Haig

115. “Keep risking ridicule.”

— Matt Haig

116. “You are not other people. You are you. You have no control over other people. You have no absolute control over what they think of the world or of politics or of you. You have no control over what harm they may have done. Even if the harm they have done is to you.”

— Matt Haig

117. “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

118. “Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain, because our desires make us crave things from the world but the world is nothing but representation.”

— Matt Haig

119. “The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare. And my life –and my mess of a mind –needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. 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.”

— Matt Haig

120. “It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.”

— Matt Haig

121. “Don’t worry about things you can’t control. The news is full of things you can’t do anything about. Do the things you can do stuff about – raise awareness of issues that concern you, give whatever you can to whichever cause you feel passionate about, and also accept the things you can’t do.”

— Matt Haig

122. “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. – Albert Camus, A Happy Death.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

124. “Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.”

— Matt Haig

125. “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

126. “Do you ever think ‘how did I end up here?’ Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it’s all your fault because you were the one who made every turn?”

— Matt Haig

127. “But she’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.”

— Matt Haig

128. “To want is to lack. That is what it means.”

— Matt Haig

129. “It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.”

— Matt Haig

130. “You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”

— Matt Haig

131. “Saya sudah mengulur-ulur waktu menjadi dewasa, dan pikiran tentang kehidupan saya selanjutnya sebagai orang dewasa menaungi saya bagai gumpalan awan gelap yang sekarang mulai pecah dan menurunkan hujan.”

— Matt Haig

132. “Most gossip is envy in disguise.”

— Matt Haig

133. “You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”

— Matt Haig

134. “She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”

— Matt Haig

135. “You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.”

— Matt Haig

136. “It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living.”

— Matt Haig

137. “That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can’t be tamed.”

— Matt Haig

138. “The paradox of modern life is this: we have never been more connected and we have never been more alone.”

— Matt Haig

139. “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

140. “You can have everything and feel nothing.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

142. “Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. 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

143. “Tough love doesn’t work. Turns out that just good old ‘love’ is enough.”

— Matt Haig

144. “Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ’is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.”

— Matt Haig

145. “The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.”

— Matt Haig

146. “Minds can’t see what they can’t handle. It’s like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick.”

— Matt Haig

147. “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

148. “Want is an interesting word. It means lack.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

150. “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