Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.”

— Matt Haig

202. “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. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.”

— Matt Haig

203. “Don’t aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes.”

— Matt Haig

204. “People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don’t even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.”

— Matt Haig

205. “You will regret the fear. In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware–a nurse who worked in palliative care–shared her experience of talking to those near the end of their lives. Far and away the biggest regret they had was fear. Many of Bronnie’s patients were in deep anguish that they had spent their whole lives worrying. Lives consumed by fear. Worrying what other people thought of them. A worry that had stopped them being true to themselves.”

— Matt Haig

206. “Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.”

— Matt Haig

207. “One day, if you get into a position of power, tell people this: 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

208. “You get up. You put on your clothes. And then you put on your personality. Choose wisely.”

— Matt Haig

209. “Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”

— Matt Haig

210. “Employment is becoming a dehumanizing process, as if humans existed to serve work, rather than work to serve humans.”

— Matt Haig

211. “Ignore idiots with narrow definitions od beauty. They are blind to life’s imperfect wonder.”

— Matt Haig

212. “I feel a swell of pride. This. This right here is why I wanted to become a teacher. To know that it is possible to change the world for the better, in however small a way.”

— Matt Haig

213. “Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.”

— Matt Haig

214. “I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.”

— Matt Haig

215. “The meaning of life. There is none. People search for external values and meaning in a world which not only can’t provide it but is also indifferent to their quest.”

— Matt Haig

216. “If you failed one test, there was a test to see why. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will.”

— Matt Haig

217. “Nora went through her social media. No messages, no comments, no new followers, no friend requests. She was antimatter, with added self-pity.”

— Matt Haig

218. “It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.”

— Matt Haig

219. “And how could I believe that Australian wine was automatically inferior to wine sourced from other regions on the planet when I had never drunk anything but liquid nitrogen?”

— Matt Haig

220. “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. So if it catches you smiling, even fake smiling, then – well, that stuff’s just not allowed and you know it, so here comes ten tons of counterbalance.”

— Matt Haig

221. “I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.”

— Matt Haig

222. “You don’t need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark.”

— Matt Haig

223. “Don’t compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don’t drown in a sea of ‘what ifs’. Don’t clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes where you made different decisions.”

— Matt Haig

224. “The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality.”

— Matt Haig

225. “Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,000 roads. Be the orange at sunset that outclasses the pink of sunrise. Be the self that dares to be true.”

— Matt Haig

226. “Sip, don’t gulp.”

— Matt Haig

227. “Words – spoken or written – are what connect us to the world, and so speaking about it to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves.”

— Matt Haig

228. “We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.”

— Matt Haig

229. “I hate depression. I am scared of it. Terrified, in fact. But at the same time, it has made me who I am. And if – for me – it is the price of feeling life, it’s a price always worth paying. I am satisfied just to be.”

— Matt Haig

230. “Just give yourself one simple reminder that the world is full of wonders. Even if we are at a point in life where we can’t appreciate things, it sometimes helps to remember there are things in this world to enjoy, when we are ready.”

— Matt Haig

231. “To experience beauty on Earth, you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. That is why so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and the Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived.”

— Matt Haig

232. “Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place. She had no idea about any of it, really. But on that boat she realised something. She had loved her parents more than she ever knew, and right then, she forgave them completely.”

— Matt Haig

233. “Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.”

— Matt Haig

234. “Imagine yourself as a baby. You would look at that baby and think they lacked nothing. That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of a human life.”

— Matt Haig

235. “If there is a way out, a way that isn’t death itself, then the exit route is through words. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.”

— Matt Haig

236. “You reach a certain age – sometimes it’s fifteen, sometimes it’s forty-six – and you realize the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn’t working.”

— Matt Haig

237. “Failure is a trick of the light.”

— Matt Haig

238. “10. Breathe. Breathe deep and pure and smooth. Concentrate on it. Breathing is the pace you set your life at. It’s the rhythm of the song of you. It’s how to get back to the centre of things. The centre of yourself. When the world wants to take you in every other direction. It was the first thing you learned to do. The most essential and simple thing you do. To be aware of breath is to remember you are alive.”

— Matt Haig

239. “So the fact that this book exists is proof that depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong.”

— Matt Haig

240. “Lincoln is not the only famous leader to have battled depression. Winston Churchill lived with the ‘black dog’ for much of his life too. Watching a fire, he once remarked to a young researcher he was employing: ‘I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed.”

— Matt Haig

241. “Feeling you have no time doesn’t mean you have no time. Feeling you are ugly doesn’t mean you are ugly. Feeling anxious doesn’t mean you need to be anxious. Feeling you haven’t achieved enough doesn’t mean you haven’t achieved enough. Feeling you lack things doesn’t make you less complete.”

— Matt Haig

242. “If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here. Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles. It’s about the determination to keep walking forward.”

— Matt Haig

243. “Two mirrors, opposite and facing each other at perfectly parallel angles, viewing themselves through the other, the view as deep as infinity... Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realise – having done so – that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and self-deceptions.”

— Matt Haig

244. “When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don’t speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.”

— Matt Haig

245. “She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.”

— Matt Haig

246. “Listen, emotions have logic. Without emotions humans wouldn’t care for each other, and if they didn’t care for each other, the species would have died out. To care for others is self-preservation. You care for someone and they care for you.”

— Matt Haig

247. “Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered.”

— Matt Haig

248. “I slipped into a state beyond my usual grief and restlessness and anxiety and despair – one of not feeling anything at all. And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive.”

— Matt Haig

249. “The progress of humanity seemed to be measured in the distance we placed between ourselves and nature.”

— Matt Haig

250. “Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become more human.”

— Matt Haig