Top 500 Susan Cain Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Some of the world’s most talented people are introverts. Without them we wouldn’t have the Apple computer, the theory of relativity or Van Gogh’s sunflowers.”

— Susan Cain

52. “The wind howls, but the mountain remains still.”

— Susan Cain

53. “We might call this the “rubber band theory” of personality. We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only so much.”

— Susan Cain

54. “In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. We like to think that we value individuality, but mostly we admire the type of individual who’s comfortable ’putting himself out there.”

— Susan Cain

55. “Even when the attention focused on me is positive, I am uncomfortable being looked at by a lot of people – it’s just not my natural state of being.”

— Susan Cain

56. “Stay true to your own nature. If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don’t let others make you feel as if you have to race. If you enjoy depth, don’t force yourself to seek breadth.”

— Susan Cain

57. “Scores of studies have shown that venting doesn’t soothe anger; it fuels it.”

— Susan Cain

58. “Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way.”

— Susan Cain

59. “Introverts need to trust their gut and share their ideas as powerfully as they can.”

— Susan Cain

60. “Your tendency to be inward-directed or outward-directed is huge; it governs every part of the way you live and work and love.”

— Susan Cain

61. “Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”

— Susan Cain

62. “The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.”

— Susan Cain

63. “Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi – all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to.”

— Susan Cain

64. “What if you love knowledge for its own sake, not necessarily as a blueprint to action? What if you wish there were more, not fewer reflective types in the world?”

— Susan Cain

65. “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

66. “So stay true to your own nature. If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don’t let others make you feel as if you have to race. If you enjoy depth, don’t force yourself to seek breadth. If you prefer single-tasking to multi-tasking, stick to your guns. Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way.”

— Susan Cain

67. “When you’re more focused in getting your message across than you are worrying about how people are viewing you, that’s huge.”

— Susan Cain

68. “When you’re feeling scared, genuine passion will lift you up and give you the excitement you need to propel you through your fear. Fear is a powerful enemy, but passion is an even stronger friend.”

— Susan Cain

69. “In most job interviews, people say they are looking for people skills and emotional intelligence. That’s reasonable, but the question is, how do you define what that looks like?”

— Susan Cain

70. “Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting? Must we learn to stage-manage our voices, gestures, and body language until we can tell – sell – any story we want? These seem venal aspirations, a marker of how far we’ve come – and not in a good way – since.”

— Susan Cain

71. “Most great ideas spring from solitude.”

— Susan Cain

72. “The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.”

— Susan Cain

73. “It’s as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people’s emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world.”

— Susan Cain

74. “I’m continually amazed by how many people who appear to be extroverts are actually introverts.”

— Susan Cain

75. “They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.”

— Susan Cain

76. “It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.”

— Susan Cain

77. “Our culture rightly admires risk-takers, but we need our ‘heed-takers’ more than ever.”

— Susan Cain

78. “Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.”

— Susan Cain

79. “There are only a few people out there who can completely overcome their fears, and they all live in Tibet.”

— Susan Cain

80. “Nobody is going to care who won or lost any election when the earth is uninhabitable.” – Al Gore.”

— Susan Cain

81. “I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country...”

— Susan Cain

82. “Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately.”

— Susan Cain

83. “Don’t mistake assertiveness or eloquence for good ideas.”

— Susan Cain

84. “He also suggests “No-Talk Thursdays,” one day a week in which employees aren’t allowed to speak to each other.”

— Susan Cain

85. “The truth is that many schools are designed for extroverts.”

— Susan Cain

86. “Introverts, in contrast, are constitutionally programmed to downplay reward – to kill their buzz, you might say – and scan for problems. “As soon they get excited,” says Newman, “they’ll put the brakes on and think about peripheral issues that may be more important. Introverts seem to be specifically wired or trained so when they catch themselves getting excited and focused on a goal, their vigilance increases.”

— Susan Cain

87. “There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.”

— Susan Cain

88. “Naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.”

— Susan Cain

89. “The Subarctic Survival Situation may sound like a harmless game played inside the ivory tower, but if you think of meetings you’ve attended, you can probably recall a time – plenty of times – when the opinion of the most dynamic or talkative person prevailed to the detriment of all.”

— Susan Cain

90. “Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments – both physical and emotional – unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss – another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.”

— Susan Cain

91. “America had shifted from what influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a culture of character to a culture of personality, and opened up a Pandora’s box of personal anxieties of which we would never recover.”

— Susan Cain

92. “Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting?”

— Susan Cain

93. “Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances.”

— Susan Cain

94. “The trick for introverts is to honor their styles instead of allowing themselves to be swept up by prevailing norms.”

— Susan Cain

95. “We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal – the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual –.”

— Susan Cain

96. “As a parent, if give yourself what you need, your children will watch you doing that and will give themselves what they need.”

— Susan Cain

97. “If you’re in the backyard sitting under a tree while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, you’re more likely to have an apple fall on your head.”

— Susan Cain

98. “The “catharsis hypothesis” – that aggression builds up inside us until it’s healthily released – dates back to the Greeks, was revived by Freud, and gained steam during the “let it all hang out” 1960s of punching bags and primal screams. But the catharsis hypothesis is a myth – a plausible one, an elegant one, but a myth nonetheless. Scores of studies have shown that venting doesn’t soothe anger; it fuels it.”

— Susan Cain

99. “Conviction is conviction, at whatever decibel level it is expressed.”

— Susan Cain

100. “There’s a word for “people who are in their heads too much”: thinkers.”

— Susan Cain