Top 500 Susan Cain Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time.”

— Susan Cain

405. “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

406. “I don’t want my heart to be broken,” they say. Or, “I don’t want to fail.” “I understand,” Susan tells them. “But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”

— Susan Cain

407. “Iconoclast, the neuroeconomist Gregory Berns.”

— Susan Cain

408. “Those who worked with these leaders tended to describe them with the following words: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated. The lesson, says Collins, is clear. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.”

— Susan Cain

409. “The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation – the heart of the knowledge economy – is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell.”

— Susan Cain

410. “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

411. “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

412. “Studies have shown that, indeed, introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online that their family and friends would be surprised to read, to say that they can express the “real me” online, and to spend more time in certain kinds of online discussions. They welcome the chance to communicate digitally.”

— Susan Cain

413. “From an evolutionary perspective, introversion must have survived as a personality trait for a reason – so what might the reason be?”

— Susan Cain

414. “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. Is it any wonder that introverts like Pastor McHugh start to question their own hearts?”

— Susan Cain

415. “Quiet demonstrates just how deep and disturbing is this plague of extroverts – the showoffs, risk-takers, salesmen, charmers, charlatans and politicians.” – New York Post.”

— Susan Cain

416. “DeMarco and his colleague Timothy Lister devised a study called the Coding War Games.”

— Susan Cain

417. “Extroverts’ dopamine pathways appear to be more active than those of introverts. Another study found that extroverts who win gambling games have more activity in the reward-sensitive regions of their brains than victorious introverts do. Still other research has shown that the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a key component of the brain’s dopamine-driven reward system, is larger in extroverts than in introverts.”

— Susan Cain

418. “Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you,” said the ancient Greeks.”

— Susan Cain

419. “That was what collaboration meant for Steve 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

420. “The high-reactive babies were not misanthropes in the making; they were simply sensitive to their environments.”

— Susan Cain

421. “Another example, this one from the 2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, concerns a self-described introvert based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he’s well known for shutting himself inside his office for hours at a time. Warren Buffett, the legendary.”

— Susan Cain

422. “Indeed, excessive stimulation seems to impede learning: a recent study found that people learn better after a quiet stroll through the woods than after a noisy walk down a city street.”

— Susan Cain

423. “Usually they’re carried away by people who are assertive and domineering. The risk with our students is that they’re very good at getting their way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going the right way.” If.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

425. “We’re built to live simultaneously in love and loss, bitter and sweet.”

— Susan Cain

426. “Since it had to happen,” King told the crowd, “I’m happy it happened to a person like Rosa Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character. Mrs. Parks is unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there.”

— Susan Cain

427. “It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate.”

— Susan Cain

428. “He had a courtly way of exclaiming over whatever was exclaimable in people – especially kids.”

— Susan Cain

429. “What is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren’t very pleased about it?”

— Susan Cain

430. “FDR, elected at the start of the Depression, is remembered for his compassion. But it was Eleanor who made sure he knew how suffering Americans felt.”

— Susan Cain

431. “In the wake of the 2008 crash, a financial catastrophe caused in part by uncalculated risk-taking and blindness to threat, it became fashionable to speculate whether we’d have been better off with more women and fewer men – or less testosterone – on Wall Street.”

— Susan Cain

432. “We should all look out for cobblers who might have been great generals. Which means focusing on introverted children, whose talents are too often stifled, whether at home, at school, or on the playground.”

— Susan Cain

433. “Whenever you’re in an army group and somebody says, ‘I think we’re all getting on the bus to Abilene here,’ that is a red flag.”

— Susan Cain

434. “Longing itself is divine,” writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss.”

— Susan Cain

435. “Try to think of happy things,” he says, caressing my forehead. I stare at the ceiling, tears welling. What happy things? Who could be happy in a world of podiums and microphones? “There are a billion people in China who don’t give a rat’s ass about your speech,” Ken offers sympathetically.”

— Susan Cain

436. “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

437. “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

438. “The footprint of a high- or low-reactive temperament never disappeared in adulthood. We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizable part of who we are is ordained by our genes. We have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.”

— Susan Cain

439. “These students inhabit a world in which status, income, and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measured ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

442. “Some high-reactives love public speaking and performing, and plenty of extroverts have stage fright; public speaking is the number-one fear in America, far more common than the fear of death. Public speaking phobia has many causes, including early childhood setbacks, that have to do with our unique personal histories, not inborn temperament.”

— Susan Cain

443. “Introverts also seem better than extroverts at delaying gratification, a crucial life skill associated with everything from higher SAT scores and income to lower body mass index.”

— Susan Cain

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

— Susan Cain

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Susan Cain

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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