Top 500 Susan Cain Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Prolonged acting out of character may also increase autonomic nervous system activity, which can, in turn, compromise immune functioning.”

— Susan Cain

303. “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

304. “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

305. “The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities – the dark as well as the light – is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

307. “Schwartz’s research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.”

— Susan Cain

308. “The most effective leaders are not motivated by a desire to control events or to be in the spotlight. They are motivated by the desire to advance ideas and new ways of looking at the world, or to improve the situation of a group of people. These motivations belong to introverts and extroverts alike. You can achieve these same goals – you can be inspiring and motivational – without compromising your quiet ways.”

— Susan Cain

309. “But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen – to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.”

— Susan Cain

310. “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

311. “Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth.”

— Susan Cain

312. “I was the nicest person you’d ever want to know,” Alex recalls, “but the world wasn’t that way. The problem was that if you were just a nice person, you’d get crushed. I refused to live a life where people could do that stu to me. I was like, OK, what’s the policy prescription here? And there really was only one. I needed to have every person in my pocket. If I wanted to be a nice person, I needed to run the school.”

— Susan Cain

313. “And the single most important aspect of personality – the “north and south of temperament,” as one scientist puts it – is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.”

— Susan Cain

314. “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

315. “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

316. “The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.”

— Susan Cain

317. “These findings have enormous implications. They tell us that our impulse to respond to other beings’ sadness sits in the same location as our need to breathe, digest food, reproduce, and protect our babies; in the same place as our desire to be rewarded and to enjoy life’s pleasures. They tell us, as Keltner explained to me, that “caring is right at the heart of human existence. Sadness is about caring. And the mother of sadness is compassion.”

— Susan Cain

318. “May I be free from danger. May I be free from mental suffering. May I be free from physical suffering. May I have ease of well-being. The idea is to wish these states first to yourself, then to an ever-widening circle of people: loved ones, acquaintances, the difficult people in your life, and then finally to all beings.”

— Susan Cain

319. “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

320. “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

321. “Restorative niche” is Professor Little’s term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self.”

— Susan Cain

322. “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

323. “Osborn’s “rules” of brainstorming were meant to neutralize this anxiety, but studies show that the fear of public humiliation is a potent force.”

— Susan Cain

324. “The amygdala serves as the brain’s emotional switchboard, receiving information from the senses and then signaling the rest of the brain and nervous system how to respond.”

— Susan Cain

325. “The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass.”

— Susan Cain

326. “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

327. “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

328. “Here’s a rule of thumb for networking events: one new honest-to-goodness relationship is worth ten fistfuls of business cards.”

— Susan Cain

329. “Quiet persistence requires sustained attention – in effect restraining one’s reactions to external stimuli.”

— Susan Cain

330. “But we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions – from the theory of evolution to van Gogh’s sunflowers to the personal computer – came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there.”

— Susan Cain

331. “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

332. “University admissions officers looked not for the most exceptional candidates, but for the most extroverted. Harvard’s provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the “sensitive, neurotic” type and the “intellectually over-stimulated” in favor of boys of the “healthy extrovert kind.”

— Susan Cain

333. “In a group, there’s always that pressure to be outgoing.”

— Susan Cain

334. “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

335. “My dream is to live off the land on a thousand acres.”

— Susan Cain

336. “Greeters wearing UPW T-shirts and ecstatic smiles line the entrance, springing up and down, fists pumping. You can’t get inside without slapping them five. I know, because I try.”

— Susan Cain

337. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November.”

— Susan Cain

338. “It’s also why exhortations to imagine the audience in the nude don’t help nervous speakers; naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.”

— Susan Cain

339. “Bolder animals sally forth, swallowed regularly by those farther up the food chain but surviving when food is scarce and they need to assume more risk.”

— Susan Cain

340. “Indeed, studies show that face-to-face interactions create trust in a way that online interactions can’t.”

— Susan Cain

341. “Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth. In Japan, India, Iran, Argentina, South Korea, and the Maldives, smiling is viewed as dishonest, foolish, or both, according to a study by Polish psychologist Kuba Krys.”

— Susan Cain

342. “For very different reasons, shy and introverted people might choose to spend their days in behind-the-scenes pursuits like inventing, or researching, or holding the hands of the gravely ill – or in leadership positions they execute with quiet competence. These are not alpha roles, but the people who play them are role models all the same.”

— Susan Cain

343. “In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explores the influence of “Connectors” – people who have a “special gift for bringing the world together” and “an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections.”

— Susan Cain

344. “A shy man no doubt dreads the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them. He may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence about trifles in the presence of strangers.” – Charles Darwin.”

— Susan Cain

345. “I’m prone to wild flights of self-doubt, but I also have a deep well of courage in my own convictions. I feel horribly uncomfortable on my first day in a foreign city, but I love to travel. I was shy as a child, but have outgrown the worst of it.”

— Susan Cain

346. “Emotional labor,” which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like an increase in cardiovascular disease.”

— Susan Cain

347. “In a sense, Csikszentmihalyi transcends Aristotle; he is telling us that there are some activities that are not about approach or avoidance, but about something deeper: the fulfillment that comes from absorption in an activity outside yourself.”

— Susan Cain

348. “The Highly Sensitive Person.”

— Susan Cain

349. “To her husband, Art, Aron was creative, intuitive, and a deep thinker. She appreciated these things in herself, too, but saw them as “acceptable surface manifestations of a terrible, hidden flaw I had been aware of all my life.” She thought it was a miracle that Art loved her in spite of this flaw.”

— Susan Cain

350. “Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one’s peers.”

— Susan Cain