Top 500 Susan Cain Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “No one would choose this sort of painful adolescence, but the fact is that the solitude of Woz’s teens, and the single-minded focus on what would turn out to be a lifelong passion, is typical for highly creative people.”

— Susan Cain

452. “If she still doesn’t want to talk, wait for her. Sometimes she’ll need to decompress for hours before she’s ready. You may find that she’ll open up only during cozy, relaxed moments, like bathtime or bedtime. If that’s the case, make sure to build these situations into the day. And if she’ll talk to others, like a trusted babysitter, aunt, or older sibling, but not to you, swallow your pride and enlist help.”

— Susan Cain

453. “He was more interested in listening and gathering information than in asserting his opinion or dominating a conversation. He was also widely admired; when he spoke, everyone listened.”

— Susan Cain

454. “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling,” explains Jon. “They buy because they feel understood.” Jon.”

— Susan Cain

455. “I don’t want my heart to be broken,” they say. Or, “I don’t want to fail.” “I understand,” Susan tells them. “But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”

— Susan Cain

456. “How could you be shy and courageous?”

— Susan Cain

457. “I wonder whether students like the young safety officer would be better off if we appreciated that not everyone aspires to be a leader in the conventional sense of the word – that some people wish to fit harmoniously into the group, and others to be independent of it.”

— Susan Cain

458. “In this chapter I focused on the dopamine-driven reward system and its role in delivering life’s goodies. But there’s a mirror-image brain network, often called the loss avoidance system, whose job it is to call our attention to risk. If the reward network chases shiny fruit, the loss avoidance system worries about bad apples.”

— Susan Cain

459. “But what if some kids are less prone to anxiety than others, as is true of extremely low-reactive kids? Often the best way to teach these children values is to give them positive role models and to channel their fearlessness into productive activities.”

— Susan Cain

460. “Another example, this one from the 2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, concerns a self-described introvert based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he’s well known for shutting himself inside his office for hours at a time. Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the wealthiest men in the world, has used exactly the attributes we’ve explored in this chapter –.”

— Susan Cain

461. “On August 15, 2008, Pete Cashmore, the founder of Mashable, the online guide to social media, weighed in. “Wouldn’t it be a great irony,” he asked, “if the leading proponents of the ‘it’s about people’ mantra weren’t so enamored with meeting large groups of people in real life? Perhaps social media affords us the control we lack in real life socializing: the screen as a barrier between us and the world.”

— Susan Cain

462. “If these statistics surprise you, that’s probably because so many people pretend to be extroverts.”

— Susan Cain

463. “True self-esteem comes from competence, not the other way around. Researchers have found that intense engagement in and commitment to an activity is a proven route to happiness and well-being. Well-developed talents and interests can be a great source of confidence for your child, no matter how different he might feel from his peers.”

— Susan Cain

464. “They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.”

— Susan Cain

465. “Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but also occurs in more solitary situations.”

— Susan Cain

466. “It turned out that the introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call “self-monitoring.” Self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behavior to the social demands of a situation. They look for cues to tell them how to act.”

— Susan Cain

467. “We know this type of person well from literature, probably because so many writers are sensitive introverts themselves. He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men,” the novelist Eric Malpass writes of his quiet and cerebral protagonist, also an author, in the novel The Long Long Dances.”

— Susan Cain

468. “Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas.”

— Susan Cain

469. “Those who value a quiet, reflective life will feel a burden lifting from their shoulders as they read Susan Cain’s eloquent and well documented paean to introversion – and will no longer feel guilty or inferior for having made the better choice!” – MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, author of Flow and distinguished professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University.”

— Susan Cain

470. “These students inhabit a world in which status, income, and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measured ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation.”

— Susan Cain

471. “Our action plan hinged on what the most vocal people suggested,” recalls the classmate. “When the less vocal people put out ideas, those ideas were discarded. The ideas that were rejected would have kept us alive and out of trouble, but they were dismissed because of the conviction with which the more vocal people suggested their ideas.”

— Susan Cain

472. “With an average weekly attendance of 22,000 and counting, Saddleback Church is one of the largest and most influential evangelical churches in the nation.”

— Susan Cain

473. “Introversion – along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness.”

— Susan Cain

474. “If you had gathered the same people who created Linux, installed them in a giant conference room for a year, and asked them to devise a new operating system, it’s doubtful that anything so revolutionary would have occurred.”

— Susan Cain

475. “In China there was more emphasis on listening, on asking questions rather than holding forth, on putting others’ needs first. In the United States, he feels, conversation is about how effective you are at turning your experiences into stories, whereas a Chinese person might be concerned with taking up too much of the other person’s time with inconsequential information.”

— Susan Cain

476. “The people who made it through these boards were not the people with the best ideas. They were the best presenters.”

— Susan Cain

477. “Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to hold a press conference, address a national convention, write a newspaper column, and appear on talk radio.”

— Susan Cain

478. “High-reactive children raised in supportive environments are even more resistant than other kids to the common cold and other respiratory illnesses, but get sick more easily if they’re raised in stressful conditions.”

— Susan Cain

479. “It’s just the most amazing thing to see the introvert revolution literally remaking the way we organize society – this time, the world of book clubs.”

— Susan Cain

480. “If you’re not an introvert yourself, you are surely raising, managing, married to, or coupled with one.”

— Susan Cain

481. “Buzz is JFK’s Camelot, but it’s also the Kennedy Curse.”

— Susan Cain

482. “Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions.”

— Susan Cain

483. “We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable.”

— Susan Cain

484. “At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability.”

— Susan Cain

485. “He hated small talk, and his interests were out of step with those of his peers.”

— Susan Cain

486. “When someone asks us “How are things?” we may give a throwaway answer, but our true response is a function of how well our core personal projects are going.”

— Susan Cain

487. “Brigham Young University management professor Bradley Agle studied the CEOs of 128 major companies and found that those considered charismatic by their top executives had bigger salaries but not better corporate performance.”

— Susan Cain

488. “So don’t mistake your child’s caution in new situations for an inability to relate to others. He’s recoiling from novelty or overstimulation, not from human contact.”

— Susan Cain

489. “Soft power is not limited to moral exemplars like Mahatma Gandhi. Consider, for example, the much-ballyhooed excellence of Asians in fields like math and science. Professor Ni defines soft power as “quiet persistence,” and this trait lies at the heart of academic excellence as surely as it does in Gandhi’s political triumphs. Quiet persistence requires sustained attention – in effect restraining one’s reactions to external stimuli.”

— Susan Cain

490. “It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”

— Susan Cain

491. “FDR, elected at the start of the Depression, is remembered for his compassion. But it was Eleanor who made sure he knew how suffering Americans felt.”

— Susan Cain

492. “People would always tell me, ‘These are the best years of your life,’ ” he recalls. “And I would think to myself, I hope not! I hated school.”

— Susan Cain

493. “Just like a twenty-one-year-old, I’m still full of plans and ideas and excitement. But I have an acute consciousness, which I lacked fifteen years ago, that time is limited. This gives me no anxiety, at least not yet; but it does make me feel as if I should soak everything up while I still can. Carstensen told me that this was typical of midlife.”

— Susan Cain

494. “At the onset of the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for frankly selfish reasons.”

— Susan Cain

495. “Now that you’re an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book.”

— Susan Cain

496. “The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no ‘charisma’ and little use either for the term or what it signifies.” Supporting Drucker’s claim, Brigham Young University management professor Bradley Agle studied the CEOs of 128 major companies and found that those considered charismatic by their top executives had bigger salaries but not better corporate performance. We.”

— Susan Cain

497. “Many introverts seem to know these things instinctively, and resist being herded together.”

— Susan Cain

498. “No one can hear her. No one tries.”

— Susan Cain

499. “Why are some people talkative while others measure their words? Why.”

— Susan Cain

500. “They like to read; for them there’s nothing more exciting than ideas. And some of this has to do with how they spent their time when they were growing up.”

— Susan Cain