Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

155. “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

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

— Matt Haig

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Matt Haig

161. “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

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

— Matt Haig

163. “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

164. “Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. There is a power and a beauty in unproved conjectures, unkissed lips and unpicked flowers.”

— Matt Haig

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

— Matt Haig

166. “The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.”

— Matt Haig

167. “So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.”

— Matt Haig

168. “Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.”

— Matt Haig

169. “The most powerful moment in life is when you decide not to be scared anymore.”

— Matt Haig

170. “A reminder for the tough times One day this will be over. And we will be grateful for life in ways we never felt possible before.”

— Matt Haig

171. “The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it’s okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it’s – literally – cosmic.”

— Matt Haig

172. “An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are, is not how happy you are.”

— Matt Haig

173. “Facebook is where everyone lies to their friends. Twitter is where they tell the truth to strangers.”

— Matt Haig

174. “Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.”

— Matt Haig

175. “You cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.”

— Matt Haig

176. “There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. “Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath famously asked.”

— Matt Haig

177. “Obey your head. Obey your heart. Obey your gut. In fact, obey everything except commands.”

— Matt Haig

178. “End-users not technologies shape the market. Consequently marketers need to stay abreast not only of technological developments but also of the way people respond to them.”

— Matt Haig

179. “The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more. We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts.”

— Matt Haig

180. “I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn’t fit in was because I didn’t want to.”

— Matt Haig

181. “The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.”

— Matt Haig

182. “Don’t always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It’s the warm bits that matter.”

— Matt Haig

183. “She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.”

— Matt Haig

184. “New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years. Value the stuff you won’t laugh at in five years. Like love. Or a good poem. Or a song. Or the sky.”

— Matt Haig

185. “Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.”

— Matt Haig

186. “But while choice is infinite, our lives have time spans. We can’t live every life. We can’t watch every film or read every book or visit every single place on this sweet earth. Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don’t need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.”

— Matt Haig

187. “HAPPINESS IS NOT good for the economy. We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves. Our bodies are too fat, or too thin, or too saggy. Our skin is expected to have the right ‘sun-kissed glow’, or the.”

— Matt Haig

188. “As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

— Matt Haig

189. “Life is like a chimney – you sometimes have to get through the dark before you see the light.”

— Matt Haig

190. “Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.”

— Matt Haig

191. “Grief is terror, in its most undiluted form.”

— Matt Haig

192. “When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value.”

— Matt Haig

193. “The possibility of pain is where love stems from.”

— Matt Haig

194. “A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world. Buddhism does not seem to be about self-punishment. A key buddhist symbol is that of the lotus flower. The lotus flower grows in mud at the bottom of a pool, but rises above the murky water and blooms in the clear air, pure and beautiful, before eventually dying. This metaphor for spiritual enlightenment also works as a metaphor for hope and change.”

— Matt Haig

195. “You’ll be cool when you’re dead.”

— Matt Haig

196. “It’s okay to let people find you. You don’t have to spread yourself so thin you become invisible. You don’t have to always be the person reaching out. You can sometimes allow yourself to be reached. As the great writer Anne Lamott puts it: “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”

— Matt Haig

197. “Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”

— Matt Haig

198. “But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn’t perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.”

— Matt Haig

199. “Pain is a debt paid off with time.”

— Matt Haig

200. “Think of how detached we are from nature. How we have to do so much to it before we can bottle it and put the name ‘wild’ on it.”

— Matt Haig