Top 500 Susan Cain Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “For example, highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They’re often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee.”

— Susan Cain

305. “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything. – ROBERT RUBIN, In an Uncertain World.”

— Susan Cain

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “The wind howls, but the mountain remains still. – JAPANESE PROVERB.”

— Susan Cain

310. “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.”

— Susan Cain

311. “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

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

— Susan Cain

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Susan Cain

322. “High-reactive kids who enjoy good parenting, child care, and a stable home environment tend to have fewer emotional problems and more social skills than their lower-reactive peers, studies show.”

— Susan Cain

323. “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

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

— Susan Cain

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Susan Cain

328. “In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private.”

— Susan Cain

329. “Imagine how much better you’ll be at this sweet-spot game once you’re aware of playing it. You can set up your work, your hobbies, and your social life so that you spend as much time inside your sweet spot as possible.”

— Susan Cain

330. “That’s OK. She needs to become more comfortable with the sound of her own hiss. Introverts may be hesitant to cause disharmony, but, like the passive snake, they should be equally worried about encouraging vitriol from their partners. And fighting back may not invite retaliation, as Emily fears; instead it may encourage Greg to back off. She need not put on a huge display. Often, a firm “that’s not OK with me” will do.”

— Susan Cain

331. “Innovation – the heart of the knowledge economy – is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell.”

— Susan Cain

332. “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

333. “If you’re a sensitive sort, then you may be in the habit of pretending to be more of a politician and less cautious or single-mindedly focused than you actually are. But in this chapter I’m asking you to rethink this view. Without people like you, we will, quite literally, drown.”

— Susan Cain

334. “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

335. “But combine that passion for thought with attention to subtlety – both common characteristics of introverts – and you get a very powerful mix.”

— Susan Cain

336. “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

337. “She had strong, sometimes disturbing dreams at night. She was “strangely intense,” and often beset by powerful emotions, both positive and negative. She had trouble finding the sacred in the everyday; it seemed to be there only when she withdrew from the world.”

— Susan Cain

338. “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

339. “Western culture, by contrast, is organized around the individual. We see ourselves as self-contained units; our destiny is to express ourselves, to follow our bliss, to be free of undue restraint, to achieve the one thing that we, and we alone, were brought into this world to do.”

— Susan Cain

340. “But just as the nature-nurture debate was replaced with interactionism – the insight that both factors contribute to who we are, and indeed influence each other – so has the person-situation debate been superseded by a more nuanced understanding.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

342. “Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.”

— Susan Cain

343. “If there is only one insight you take away from this book, though, I hope it’s a newfound sense of entitlement to be yourself. I can vouch personally for the life-transforming effects of this outlook.”

— Susan Cain

344. “While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields.”

— Susan Cain

345. “The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it’s also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.”

— Susan Cain

346. “In iWoz, he recalls HP as a meritocracy where it didn’t matter what you looked like, where there was no premium on playing social games, and where no one pushed him from his beloved engineering work into management. That was what collaboration meant for Woz: the ability to share a donut and a brainwave with his laid-back, nonjudgmental, poorly dressed colleagues – who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.”

— Susan Cain

347. “Whatever the underlying cause, there’s a host of evidence that introverts are more sensitive than extroverts to various kinds of stimulation, from coffee to a loud bang to the dull roar of a networking event – and that introverts and extroverts often need very different levels of stimulation to function at their best.”

— Susan Cain

348. “Maybe the mystery of what percent of personality is nature and what percent nurture is less important than the question of how your inborn temperament interacts with the environment and with your own free will. To what degree is temperament destiny?”

— Susan Cain

349. “The body’s reward and threat systems also seem to work independently of each other, so that the same person can be generally sensitive, or insensitive, to both reward and threat.”

— Susan Cain

350. “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