Top 500 Susan Cain Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “If you force extroverts to pause, says Newman, they’ll do just as well as introverts at the numbers game.”

— Susan Cain

252. “The Asians were far more likely to accept a proposal from the friendly business manager than from the hostile one;.”

— Susan Cain

253. “The Internet’s role in promoting face-to-face group.”

— Susan Cain

254. “It can be hard for extroverts to understand how badly introverts need to recharge at the end of a busy day. We all empathize with a sleep-deprived mate who comes home from work too tired to talk, but it’s harder to grasp that social overstimulation can be just as exhausting.”

— Susan Cain

255. “We failed to realize that what makes sense for the asynchronous, relatively anonymous interactions of the Internet might not work as well inside the face-to-face, politically charged, acoustically noisy confines of an open-plan office. Instead of distinguishing between online and in-person interaction, we used the lessons of one to inform our thinking about the other.”

— Susan Cain

256. “I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. A thoughtless word hardly ever escaped my tongue or pen. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”

— Susan Cain

257. “Introverts often have one or two deep interests that are not necessarily shared by their peers. Sometimes they’re made to feel freaky for the force of these passions, when in fact studies show that this sort of intensity is a prerequisite to talent development. Praise these kids for their interests, encourage them, and help them find like-minded friends, if not in the classroom, then outside it.”

— Susan Cain

258. “If you’re a naturally bittersweet type, you have a head start; you’re constitutionally primed to feel the tug of impermanence. Another way to get there is simply to wait for middle age, which seems to carry some of the psychological benefits of aging without the downsides of your body falling apart.”

— Susan Cain

259. “That was exactly what happened – the conformists showed less brain activity in the frontal, decision-making regions and more in the areas of the brain associated with perception. Peer pressure, in other words, is not only unpleasant, but can actually change your view of a problem.”

— Susan Cain

260. “Outstanding introverted leaders, such as Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Patrick White and Arthur Boyd, who have created either new fields of thought or rearranged existing knowledge, have spent long periods of their lives in solitude.”

— Susan Cain

261. “One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues’ failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability. “I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas,” he said. “It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent.”

— Susan Cain

262. “The evangelical culture ties together faithfulness with extroversion,” McHugh explained. “The emphasis is on community, on participating in more and more programs and events, on meeting more and more people. It’s a constant tension for many introverts that they’re not living that out. And in a religious world, there’s more at stake when you feel that tension. It doesn’t feel like ‘I’m not doing as well as I’d like.’ It feels like ‘God isn’t pleased with me.”

— Susan Cain

263. “It’s also important for companies to groom listeners.”

— Susan Cain

264. “Introverts have wide-open information channels, causing them to be flooded with stimulation and over-aroused, while extroverts have tighter channels, making them prone to under-arousal. Over-arousal doesn’t produce anxiety so much as the sense that you can’t think straight – that you’ve had enough and would like to go home now. Under-arousal is something like cabin fever. Not enough is happening: you feel itchy, restless, and sluggish, like you need to get out of the house already.”

— Susan Cain

265. “You have to be someone who speaks well and calls attention to yourself. It’s an elitism based on something other than merit.”

— Susan Cain

266. “In fact, the very thing that many high-reactives hate most about blushing – its uncontrollability – is what makes it so socially useful. “Because it is impossible to control the blush intentionally,” Dijk speculates, blushing is an authentic sign of embarrassment. And embarrassment, according to Keltner, is a moral emotion. It shows humility, modesty, and a desire to avoid aggression and make peace.”

— Susan Cain

267. “You may be quicker than others to feel sickened by violence and ugliness, and you likely have a very strong conscience.”

— Susan Cain

268. “Americans found themselves working no longer with neighbors but with strangers. “Citizens” morphed into “employees,” facing the question of how to make a good impression on people to whom they had no civic or family ties.”

— Susan Cain

269. “Parks herself seemed aware of this paradox, calling her autobiography Quiet Strength – a title that challenges us to question our assumptions. Why shouldn’t quiet be strong? And what else can quiet do that we don’t give it credit for?”

— Susan Cain

270. “If you don’t love Jesus out loud, then it must not be real love. It’s not enough to forge your own spiritual connection to the Divine. It must be displayed publicly.”

— Susan Cain

271. “Love is essential; gregariousness is optional. Cherish your nearest and dearest. Work with colleagues you like and respect.”

— Susan Cain

272. “Big Five school of personality psychology.”

— Susan Cain

273. “As she grew older and ventured outside her family’s orbit, she continued to notice things about herself that seemed different from the norm. She could drive alone for hours and never turn on the radio. She had trouble finding the sacred in the everyday; it seemed to be there only when she withdrew from the world.”

— Susan Cain

274. “Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four.”

— Susan Cain

275. “Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances.”

— Susan Cain

276. “Our schools should teach children the skills to work with others- cooperative learning can be effective when practiced well and in moderation- but also the time and training they need to deliberately practice on their own.”

— Susan Cain

277. “It makes sense, then, that Westerners value boldness and verbal skill, traits that promote individuality, while Asians prize quiet, humility, and sensitivity, which foster group cohesion. If you live in a collective, then things will go a lot more smoothly if you behave with restraint, even submission.”

— Susan Cain

278. “So what’s John’s secret for relating to his forceful wife? He lets her know that her words were unacceptable, but he also tries to listen to their meaning. “I try to tap into my empathy,” he says. “I take her tone out of the equation. I take out the assault on my senses, and I try to get to what she’s trying to say.”

— Susan Cain

279. “Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable.”

— Susan Cain

280. “He also suffered from a certain amount of what he calls “reputational confusion,” in which he became known for being over-the-top effervescent, and the reputation fed on itself. This was the persona that others knew, so it was the persona he felt obliged to serve up.”

— Susan Cain

281. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he tells them.”

— Susan Cain

282. “The amount of space per employee shrank from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010, according to Peter Miscovich, a managing director at the real estate brokerage firm Jones Lang LaSalle.”

— Susan Cain

283. “We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts – which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.”

— Susan Cain

284. “First, when he looked closely at the existing studies on personality and leadership, he found that the correlation between extroversion and leadership was modest. Second, these studies were often based on people’s perceptions of who made a good leader, as opposed to actual results. And personal opinions are often a simple reflection of cultural bias.”

— Susan Cain

285. “Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends.”

— Susan Cain

286. “All of this would be fine if more talking were correlated with greater insight, but research suggests that there’s no such link.”

— Susan Cain

287. “Quiet Strength – a.”

— Susan Cain

288. “They said she was “timid and shy” but had “the courage of a lion.”

— Susan Cain

289. “According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits – introversion, for example – but we can and do act out of character in the service of “core personal projects.” In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly.”

— Susan Cain

290. “Amazingly, neuroscientists have even found that people who use Botox, which prevents them from making angry faces, seem to be less anger-prone than those who don’t, because the very act of frowning triggers the amygdala to process negative emotions.”

— Susan Cain

291. “Describing Asians as a “model minority” – even when meant as a compliment – is just as confining and condescending as any description that reduces individuals to a set of perceived group characteristics.”

— Susan Cain

292. “Aron and a team of scientists have also found that when sensitive people see faces of people experiencing strong feelings, they have more activation than others do in areas of the brain associated with empathy and with trying to control strong emotions. It’s as if, like Eleanor Roosevelt, they can’t help but feel what others feel.”

— Susan Cain

293. “Americans revered action and were suspicious of intellect, associating the life of the mind with the languid, ineffectual European aristocracy they had left behind.”

— Susan Cain

294. “What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things can’t be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal?” she continues. “We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you’ll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath.”

— Susan Cain

295. “He has trouble elbowing his way into class discussions; in some classes he barely speaks at all. He prefers to contribute only when he believes he has something insightful to add, or honest-to-God disagrees with someone.”

— Susan Cain

296. “Words are potentially dangerous weapons that reveal things better left unsaid. They hurt other people; they can get their speaker into trouble.”

— Susan Cain

297. “This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the “bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death – bitter and sweet – are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it.”

— Susan Cain

298. “If you’re a teacher, enjoy your gregarious and participatory students. But don’t forget to cultivate the shy, the gentle, the autonomous, the ones with single-minded enthusiasms for chemistry sets or parrot taxonomy or nineteenth-century art. They are the artists, engineers, and thinkers of tomorrow.”

— Susan Cain

299. “One of the most humane phrases in the English language – “Only connect!” – was written by the distinctly introverted E. M. Forster in a novel exploring the question of how to achieve “human love at its height.”

— Susan Cain

300. “The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of available power, but to use well the kind you’ve been granted.”

— Susan Cain