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Susan Cain Quotes
born 1968 United States
Susan Cain (born 1968) is an American writer and lecturer, and author of the non-fiction book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (2012) which argues that modern Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and capabilities of introverted people. Her follow-on book, Quiet Power (2016), was adapted for children and teens, and for their educators and parents.
United States Authors Lawyers Non-fiction authors Also known as: Bittersweet, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Random Susan Cain quote
59 quotes
Our culture is biased against quiet and reserved people, but introverts are responsible for some of humanity's greatest achievements.
Human beings are a meaning-making species.
Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk.
We have a two-tier class system when it comes to personality style. To devalue introversion is a waste of talent, energy and happiness.
The world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly.
Our culture rightly admires risk-takers, but we need our “heed-takers” more than ever.
We (introverts) are not anti-social; we’re differently social.
Introversion — along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness — is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.
Extroverts are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing what is, while their introverted peers are asking what if.
In fact, you could say that what orients a person to the bittersweet is a heightened awareness of finality.
Longing is momentum in disguise: It's active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine.
Being able to exist in a place where light and dark meet is actually not a recipe for unhappiness. It is a recipe for a deeper kind of happiness.
How did a nation founded on so much heartache turn into a culture of normative smiles?
Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it's sad music that makes us want to touch the sky.
There's a reason that so many religions and wisdom traditions counsel meditating on death, and it's because there's almost nothing that delivers you so quickly to the preciousness of life than to think about death.
I prefer listening to talking, reading to socializing … I like to think before I speak (softly).
It doesn’t matter whether we consider ourselves "secular" or "religious": in some fundamental way, we're all reaching for the heavens.
The secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.
"Expressive writing" encourages us to see our misfortunes not as flaws that make us unfit for worldly success (or otherworldly heaven), but as the seeds of our growth.
Longing is the great human state.
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