SCSusan Cain

48 collected words

Susan Cain

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Introverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. 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 / quote

02Undated

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 / quote

03Undated

Soft power is quiet persistence.

Susan Cain / quote

04Undated

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

Susan Cain / quote

05Undated

Events like this don't give me the sense of oneness others seem to enjoy; it's always been private occasions that make me feel connected to the joys and sorrows of the world, often in the form of communion with writers and musicians I'll never meet in person. Proust called these moments of unity between writer and reader 'that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Susan Cain / quote

06Undated

What's so magical about solitude? In many fields, it's only when you're alone that you can engage in deliberate practice. This is the key to exceptional achievement.

Susan Cain / quote

07Undated

One noteworthy study suggests that people who suppress negative emotions tend to leak those emotions later in unexpected ways. The psychologist Judith Grob asked people to hide their emotions when she showed them disgusting images. She even had them hold pens in their mouths to prevent them from frowning. She found that this group reported feeling less disgusted by the pictures than did those who'd been allowed to react naturally. Later, however, the people who hid their emotions suffered side effects. Their memory was impaired, and the negative emotions they'd suppressed seemed to color their outlook. When Grob had them fill in the missing letter to the word "gr_ss", for example, they were more likely than others to offer "gross" rather than "grass". "People who tend to [suppress their negative emotions] regularly," concludes Grob, "might start to see their world in a more negative light." p. 223

Susan Cain / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

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 / quote

10Undated

There's nothing more exciting than ideas.

Susan Cain / quote

11Undated

Introverts just just don't buzz as easily.

Susan Cain / quote

12Undated

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 / quote

13Undated

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 / quote

14Undated

you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

Susan Cain / quote

15Undated

If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent.

Susan Cain / quote

16Undated

We have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionally.

Susan Cain / quote

17Undated

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 stuff to me.

Susan Cain / quote

18Undated

Most people who have grown up introverted in this very extroverted culture of ours have had painful experiences of feeling like they are out of step with what's expected of them. Parenting can pose unique challenges for introverted parents, who fear that their own painful experiences will be repeated in their children's lives.

Susan Cain / quote

19Undated

We need to do teacher training to educate them about what temperament means. Shyness is painful and you want to help a child with shyness - but the underlying temperament of being a careful, sensitive person is to be honoured, valued and respected.

Susan Cain / quote

20Undated

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 / quote

21Undated

Shyness is about the fear of social judgments - at a job interview or a party you might be excessively worried about what people think of you. Whereas an introvert might not feel any of those things at all, they simply have the preference to be in a quieter setting.

Susan Cain / quote

22Undated

All personality traits have their good side and their bad side. But for a long time, we've seen introversion only through its negative side and extroversion mostly through its positive side.

Susan Cain / quote

23Undated

A widely held, but rarely articulated, belief in our society is that the ideal self is bold, alpha, gregarious. Introversion is viewed somewhere between disappointment and pathology.

Susan Cain / quote

24Undated

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 / quote