Quote collection
132 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you're supposed to. Stay home on New Year's Eve if that's what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story. Make a deal with yourself that you'll attend a set number of social events in exchange for not feeling guilty when you beg off."
"The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up."
"Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not."
"The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor Paradise Lost was dashed off by a party animal."
"I prefer listening to talking, reading to socializing... I like to think before I speak (softly)."
"Love is essential, gregariousness is optional."
"[Introverts,] 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 lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality ... is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum."
"Solve problems, make art, think deeply."
"Introverts are offered keys to private gardens full of riches. To possess such a key is to tumble like Alice down her rabbit hole. She didn't choose to go to Wonderland - but she made of it an adventure that was fresh and fantastic and very much her own."
"Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform."
"Scores of studies have shown that venting doesn't soothe anger; it fuels it."
"Evangelicalism has taken the Extrovert Ideal to its logical extreme...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."
"Introverts living under the Extroversion Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are."
"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."
"Shyness is inherently uncomfortable; introversion is not. The traits do overlap, though psychologists debate to what degree."
"Solitude is one of our great superpowers... Solitude is the key to being able to make effective decisions and then having the courage of convictions to stand behind those decisions."
"The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend these relationships into the real world."
"Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way."
"Don't think of introversion as something that needs to be cured."