Introversion Quotes

In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...

~ André Gide

the idea of being invisibly alone in a crowd of strangers is so tempting for a number of introverts...or maybe for loneliness?

~ Jennifer William

I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little bit of a loner. It’s been a big part of my maturing process to learn to allow people to support me. I tend to be very self-reliant and private. And I have this history of wanting to work things out on my own and protect people from what’s going on with me.

~ Kerry Washington

During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

~ Edward Carey

At least a third of the world’s population are introverts. While they can pretend to be extroverts for a while, frankly, the task is exhausting. I hope Charlotte accurately portrayed the complexities of this personality. Contrary to common belief, introverts are not necessarily shy. They are not misanthropists. Though they gain energy from solitude and quiet, they don’t always like to be by themselves. They are, however, wonderful observers of the world around them, are quite self- aware, and prefer deep conversations to small talk. They are also inclined to think that there’s something seriously wrong with them. Many times they desperately hope that if they just try hard enough, they’ll be able to be like everyone else. I should know. I am one. Perhaps my novels always speak to questions of worth because so often I doubt my own.

~ Mitchell

Often, we find ourselves wedged in the middle of a draining conversation. We might desperately want to dislodge ourselves from the interaction, but instead we stay in receiving mode, absorbing their words like a slow-acting poison.

~ Michaela Chung

We don't need to be in a designated role to take ownership of our environment. We can simply decide that we will be the giver, the helper, or the greeter wherever we are. We can even make a little game of it. We can tell ourselves: Today, I'm going to make at least three new people feel welcome. Or we can say: At this party, I'm going to gift two people a genuine compliment.

~ Michaela Chung

I would say that introverts make some of the best international philosophers. The less common attribute of the introverted lifestyle - a close societal connection, as such a connection disappears or changes in relevance as the currents of the winds change - leaves too much room for one's own cultural bias. Instead, introverts tend to turn inward, the laboratory of being and all its forms. This is the most accurate study of the individual human being, which is in turn, rather than those affected by cultural limitations, the most universal reflection of human understanding and human behavior.

~ Criss Jami

A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing a “way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.

~ Gaston Bachelard

Fish held the silence for so long that I had to restrain myself from prodding her. That's never a good idea. Sometimes people hesitate because they don't have the courage to come out with whatever needs to be said, other times they desperately want to speak but can't find the words. Jabbing them prematurely tends to shut them up. Outwaiting them gives them the time to say more than they intend.

~ Adam-Troy Castro

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

Because loners are born everywhere, we end up living everywhere. We do not, have not, tended to single ourselves out as special, elite, requiring rarefied environments. Too often we have done the opposite; lived where we lived because our jobs were there, or families, or because we'd heard the schools were good there, or that we would love a place with changing seasons. Then, no matter what, we put our noses to the grindstone. We take living there as a fait accompli, a fact. Too often we are miserable somewhere without realizing why. We blame ourselves for not buckling down, settling in, fitting in. The problem is the place, but too often we do not see this, we will not allow ourselves to see this. It's the same old thing: This is a friendly town, so what's your problem?...To the non-loner, or the self-reproaching loner, the fact of being a loner is not comparable to those other determinants. It is not a matter of life and death, we tell ourselves. It its not a matter of breathing or of execution by stoning. But home is the crucible of living...So how can living not be a matter of life and death?

~ Anneli Rufus

Potential was a red herring to plot a life of wandering curiosity.

~ Nicholas Dawidoff

We do not require company. In varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over. Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course, the rest of the world doesn't understand.

~ Anneli Rufus

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

How difficult it is to find solitude in a world that constantly demands your attention.

~ Joyce Rachelle

Only a few have learned to savor the significance of solitude. Those who can glory in being alone on occasion are the saint or poet or explorer.

~ William P. Barker

Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful - as if the finite were for a second infinity - as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity - as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post office, and at the sociable, and at the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another.

~ Henry David Thoreau

It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

I was beginning to realize that what I wanted was the noise of people living near me, but not near enough to cause any inaudible noises to show up because I knew that those sorts of noises often shift into inaudible minor chords and I am unable to deal with that shift.

~ Catherine Lacey

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

It is, in truth, our responsibility to understand our needs and to adjust our perceptions,thoughts, decisions, behaviors, and environments to reflect these needs. We can’t force others to change, but we can change ourselves.

~ Aletheia Luna

the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation

~ Marcel Proust

There's nothing more exciting than ideas.

~ Susan Cain

A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

There are two distinct groups of people in the world: the ones who tell stories, and those who pay attention.

~ Daniel Gonçalves

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

Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.

~ Carlos Fuentes

Introverts don't like small talk conversation, but they typically don't mind writing. The more people can see you on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or a blog, the more they will feel like they know you, even though you don't have one-on-one interaction with them.

~ Thom S. Rainer

For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.

~ Isaac Newton

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

~ Susan Cain

But the most important thing to know about being an introvert is that there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken because you’re quiet. It’s okay to stay home on a Friday night instead of going to a party. Being an introvert is a perfectly normal 'thing' to be.

~ Jenn Granneman

You are like an ocean: quietly ebbing and flowing to the rhythm of life, but wildly expansive and profoundly powerful. You are boundless. You are whole. Your quietness is your strength. Your depth is your advantage.

~ Aletheia Luna