Susan Cain

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.

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.

We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.

We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we're really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we're forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life needn't eat life in order to survive.

The very highest states—of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity—emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect—but because it's not.

Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering.

Living in a bittersweet state, with an intense awareness of life's fragility and the pain of separation, is an underappreciated strength and an unexpected path to wisdom, joy, and especially communion.

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.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to.

One honest relationship can be more productive than fistfuls of business cards.

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.

Groups follow the most charismatic person, even though there is no correlation between being a good speaker and having great ideas.