Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. 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

302. “Impossible. An old elf swearword.”

— Matt Haig

303. “You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versaillles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don’t get away with anything.”

— Matt Haig

304. “I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time – almost all of it – with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could have been born with fewer moles and bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life form.”

— Matt Haig

305. “Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do. Be a work minimalist. Minimalism is about doing more with less. So much of working life seems to be about doing less with more. Activity isn’t always the same as achievement.”

— Matt Haig

306. “The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called ‘The World’. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.”

— Matt Haig

307. “I suppose, in the absence of universal certainties, we are our own best laboratory.”

— Matt Haig

308. “Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end.”

— Matt Haig

309. “What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.”

— Matt Haig

310. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’ – Sylvia Plath.”

— Matt Haig

311. “You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident. So what should we do? Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation.”

— Matt Haig

312. “A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before.”

— Matt Haig

313. “Catholicism, I discovered, was a type of Christianity for humans who like gold leaf, Latin and guilt.”

— Matt Haig

314. “In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself.”

— Matt Haig

315. “If the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.”

— Matt Haig

316. “Blood doesn’t satisfy cravings. It magnifies them.”

— Matt Haig

317. “Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can’t escape from. It is a switch to another language. The kiss was an act of defiance, maybe of war. You can’t touch us, is what the kiss said.”

— Matt Haig

318. “There are things I have experienced I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-day street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.”

— Matt Haig

319. “Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.”

— Matt Haig

320. “I had been through no war and yet I related to that feeling of pain contained in every new day, as “Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.” It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with posttraumatic 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

321. “That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another’s pain as if our own.”

— Matt Haig

322. “I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.”

— Matt Haig

323. “You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don’t worry about it.”

— Matt Haig

324. “To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”

— Matt Haig

325. “One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it. There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrorized.”

— Matt Haig

326. “A quark is not the smallest thing. The smallest thing is the regret you will feel on your deathbed for not having worked more.”

— Matt Haig

327. “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

328. “You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to be a bad cover version of the twentieth, but what could we do? People’s minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap. It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.”

— Matt Haig

329. “School is a joke. But go along with it, because you are very near to the punchline.”

— Matt Haig

330. “In those moments that burst alive the present lasts forever, and I know there are many more presents to live.”

— Matt Haig

331. “There will be other days. And other feelings.”

— Matt Haig

332. “Perhaps a wish was just a hope with better aim.”

— Matt Haig

333. “One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock. Not to be in a state of panic about the panic. To change what you can change and not get frustrated by what you can’t.”

— Matt Haig

334. “To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically.”

— Matt Haig

335. “If you’re feeling mentally unwell, treat yourself as you would a physical problem.”

— Matt Haig

336. “There is no shame in not watching news. There is no shame in not going on Twitter. There is no shame in disconnecting.”

— Matt Haig

337. “I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.”

— Matt Haig

338. “No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren’t sharp enough to hurt.”

— Matt Haig

339. “The hardest question I have ever been asked is: ‘How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?’ The answer is that you stay alive for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also the people you will be.”

— Matt Haig

340. “The past is never gone. It just hides.”

— Matt Haig

341. “She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.”

— Matt Haig

342. “Life is hard. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard.”

— Matt Haig

343. “If God exists, what is He but a mathematician?”

— Matt Haig

344. “You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger.”

— Matt Haig

345. “She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.”

— Matt Haig

346. “Sadness seemed to me like a disease, and I worried it was contagious.”

— Matt Haig

347. “Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine. and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?”

— Matt Haig

348. “Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too.”

— Matt Haig

349. “So, as was often the case, a big fear was beaten by a bigger fear. The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one.”

— Matt Haig

350. “The sense of being physically empty, of dissolving, of being a ghost whose existence was sourced by electric anxiety. And it became hard to breathe. The air thinned. It took massive concentration just to keep control of my breathing.”

— Matt Haig