Top 500 Susan Cain Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Ericsson wondered what had happened. “I really thought about this a lot,” he recalls in an interview with Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code.”

— Susan Cain

452. “Don’t think of introversion as something that needs to be cured. If an introverted child needs help with social skills, teach her or recommend training outside class, just as you’d do for a student who needs extra attention in math or reading. But celebrate these kids for who they are.”

— Susan Cain

453. “Conspiracy of Fools, a book about the Enron scandal.”

— Susan Cain

454. “Psychopaths and heroes are twigs on the same genetic branch.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

456. “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

457. “The one exception to this is online brainstorming. Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it performs. The same is true of academic research – professors who work together electronically, from different physical locations, tend to produce research that is more influential than those either working alone or collaborating face-to-face.”

— Susan Cain

458. “But public opinion was beside the point for Franklin and Eleanor. Each had strengths that the other craved – her empathy, his bravado. “E is an Angel,” Franklin wrote in his journal. When she accepted his marriage proposal in 1903, he proclaimed himself the happiest man alive. She responded with a flood of love letters. They were married in 1905 and went on to have six children.”

— Susan Cain

459. “McHugh helped the students find rhythms in their lives that allowed them to claim the solitude they needed and enjoyed, and to have social energy left over for leading others.”

— Susan Cain

460. “Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately.”

— Susan Cain

461. “We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts – which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.”

— Susan Cain

462. “No confunda la firmeza o la elocuencia con las buenas ideas.”

— Susan Cain

463. “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

464. “Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe. The compassionate instinct is also a fundamental aspect of the human success story – and one of the great powers of bittersweetness.”

— Susan Cain

465. “The “Bus to Abilene” anecdote reveals our tendency to follow those who initiate action – any action.”

— Susan Cain

466. “Many foreign-born professionals experience this; you’re a glorified laborer instead of a leader.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

468. “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

469. “We can also trace our admiration of extroverts to the Greeks, for whom oratory was an exalted skill, and to the Romans, for whom the worst possible punishment was banishment from the city, with its teeming social life.”

— Susan Cain

470. “Here’s one answer: social media has made new forms of leadership possible for scores of people who don’t fit the Harvard Business School mold.”

— Susan Cain

471. “Remarkable, but perhaps not surprising. Psychologists are trained to heal, so their research naturally focuses on problems and pathology.”

— Susan Cain

472. “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

473. “Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.”

— Susan Cain

474. “Extroverts need to know that introverts – who often seem to disdain the superficial – may be only too happy to be tugged along to a more lighthearted place; and introverts, who sometimes feel as if their propensity for problem talk makes them a drag, should know that they make it safe for others to get serious.”

— Susan Cain

475. “But Edgar is an avowed introvert. “I’d much rather sit and read and think about things than talk to people,” he says.”

— Susan Cain

476. “Keltner, is a moral emotion.”

— Susan Cain

477. “Your degree of extroversion seems to influence how many friends you have, in other words, but not how good a friend you are.”

— Susan Cain

478. “Everyone assumes that it’s good to accentuate positive emotions, but that isn’t correct.”

— Susan Cain

479. “Similarly, at Microsoft, many employees enjoy their own private offices, yet they come with sliding doors, movable walls, and other features that allow occupants to decide when they want to collaborate and when they need private time to think. These kinds of diverse workspaces benefit introverts as well as extroverts, the systems design researcher Matt Davis told me, because they offer more spaces to retreat to than traditional open-plan offices.”

— Susan Cain

480. “But does it always make sense to equate leadership with hyper-extroversion?”

— Susan Cain

481. “And it’s the kids we might call the most sensitive, the most high-reactive, the ones who are likely to be introverts who feel the guiltiest.”

— Susan Cain

482. “A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope.”

— Susan Cain

483. “Public Speaking–Social Anxiety Center of New York.”

— Susan Cain

484. “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

485. “It’s because of relationship honoring, for example, that social anxiety disorder in Japan, known as taijin kyofusho, takes the form not of excessive worry about embarrassing oneself, as it does in the United States, but of embarrassing others.”

— Susan Cain

486. “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

487. “When you look at big companies, almost none of the top executives are Asians. They hire someone who doesn’t know anything about the business, but maybe he can make a good presentation.”

— Susan Cain

488. “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

489. “Mike sounded dismissive of Western communication styles, but he admitted that he sometimes wished he could be noisy and uninhibited himself. “They’re more comfortable with their own character,” he said of his Caucasian classmates. Asians are “not uncomfortable with who they are, but are uncomfortable with expressing who they are. In a group, there’s always that pressure to be outgoing. When they don’t live up to it, you can see it in their faces.”

— Susan Cain

490. “Remember that there are many paths to a satisfying life.”

— Susan Cain

491. “He also describes her as “the anchor” around which his world revolves.”

— Susan Cain

492. “The results were unambiguous. The men in twenty-three of the twenty-four groups produced more ideas when they worked on their own than when they worked as a group. They also produced ideas of equal or higher quality when working individually. And the advertising executives were no better at group work than the presumably introverted research scientists.”

— Susan Cain

493. “But the more interesting aspect of this puzzling behavior is not what the extroverts do before they’ve hit the wrong button, but what they do after. When introverts hit the number nine button and find they’ve lost a point, they slow down before moving on to the next number, as if to reflect on what went wrong. But extroverts not only fail to slow down, they actually speed up.”

— Susan Cain

494. “Participation places a very different set of demands on the brain than observing does. It requires a kind of mental multitasking: the ability to process a lot of short-term information at once without becoming distracted or overly stressed.”

— Susan Cain

495. “It’s a Free Trait Agreement when you attend your extroverted best friend’s wedding shower, engagement celebration, and bachelorette party, but she understands when you skip out on the three days’ worth of group activities leading up to the wedding itself.”

— Susan Cain

496. “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

497. “Gandhi’s passivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

499. “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

500. “This balance, I think, is what Elaine Aron would say is our natural state of being, at least in Indo-European cultures like ours, which she observes have long been divided into “warrior kings”and “priestly advisers,”into the executive branch and the judicial branch, into bold and easy FDRs and sensitive, conscientious Eleanor Roosevelts.”

— Susan Cain