Susan Cain

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.

For seven blissful years I had spent my time reading, writing and researching a book about introversion. But the publication date had arrived, the idyll was over and my metamorphosis was complete. I was now that impossibly oxymoronic creature: the Public Introvert.

It's not that pain equals art. It's that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better. ... The quest to transform pain into beauty is one of the great catalysts of artistic expression.

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.

Seneca suggested that each night we tell ourselves that "You may not wake up tomorrow," and that we greet every morning with the reminder that "You may not sleep again." All of these practices are meant to help us treat our lives, and each other, as the precious gifts they are.

When you listen to music, you can transcend your own pain and turn towards another and feel bonded with the whole of humanity because you know that they have felt that grief and love. By expressing it, by communing with that song or picture, you realize you are not alone.

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.

(T)he bittersweet tradition spans centuries—it spans continents. And it teaches us that we are creatures who are born to transform pain into beauty. It also teaches us that our feelings of bittersweetness are some of the greatest gateways that we have to states of creativity and connection and love.

There's no correlation between expressing an idea assertively or charismatically, and having a good idea.