25 Quiet Quotes Challenging Personality Narratives

Learn more about introvert and extrovert personality types with these Quiet quotes from the popular book. 

Susan Cain’s Quiet has fascinated readers with its exploration of how our personalities impact our lives. 

Check out our Quiet quotes below to learn more. 

What is Quiet?

Quiet is a book by Susan Cain that explores what it means to be an achiever or a leader in an extroverted world. 

It was first published in 2013. 

Quiet explores the following themes

• How extroverted personality types became the ideal. 
• Why Western society undervalues introverted personality types. 
• Ways we can balance our perspective and expand how we view introverts. 

Is the extrovert ideal an illusion?

Some say Cain has a bold perspective

Cain shares that she has an introverted personality. 

Her work challenges Western cultural values.

She aims to overturn the extrovert ideal, where Western cultural values are dominated by an ideal self that is alpha, gregarious, and in the spotlight. 

Many people would agree that we are taught that to be successful, you must be outgoing, aggressive, or bold. 

Susan Cain challenges this narrative and explains why introverted personality types are undervalued. 

She argues that we can collectively and individually bring out our best by changing how we see introversion. 

Defining personality types

If your next question is, “What is an introvert” we have you covered below:

What is an introvert?

An introvert is a personality type where people feel more at ease, focusing on their inner thoughts and ideas rather than what’s happening externally. 

They may enjoy just spending time with just one or two people rather than large groups of crowds. 

What is an extrovert?

An extrovert is a personality type characterized by expressive and outgoing behavior patterns. 

They might be talkative, social, and warm. 

Many extroverts feel energized by the external world and social interactions. 

All personality types have strengths and weaknesses

There is no perfect personality type

In life, there will be moments where being either introverted or extroverted may be advantageous. 

However, Cain makes a powerful argument about the need to expand how we see introversion. 

To learn more, check out our Quiet quotes below. 

Short Quiet quotes for starting your dream today

Below we have some apt and powerful Quiet quotes from Susan Cain. 

1. “The answer isn’t obvious.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

2. “We want to attract creative people.” — Susan Cain, Quiet

3. “We see salesmanship as a way of sharing one’s gifts with the world.” — Susan Cain, Quiet  

4. “By hesitating, do you risk losing others’ trust and your own momentum?” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

5. “A favorable first impression is the greatest single factor in business or social success.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

The best Quiet quotes about talking and leadership

Here Susan explains the connections we make between leadership and public speaking. 

6. “We also see talkers as leaders. — Susan Cain, Quiet 

7. “We are similarly inclined to empower dynamic speakers.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

8. “If you speak firmly on the basis of bad information, you can lead your people into disaster.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

9. “It also helps to speak fast; we rater quick talkers as more capable and appealing than slow talkers.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

10. “The more a person talks, the more other group members direct their attention to [them], which means that [they] become increasingly more powerful as a meeting goes on.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

The top Quiet quotes about interpersonal relationships in a business 

Below, Cain explains how social dynamics impact a company’s success. 

11. “An awful log of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

12. “Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

13. “All of this would be fine if more talking were correlated with greater insight, but research [and common sense] suggests that there’s no such link.” — Susan Cain, Quiet  

14. “When [the author] asked what she meant by ‘creative,’ she answered without missing a beat, You have to be outgoing, fun, and jazzed up to work here.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

15. “In the United States, conversation is about how effective you are turning your experiences into stories, whereas a Chinese person might be concerned with taking up too much of the other person’s time with inconsequential information.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

Quiet quotes and sayings about American business culture

Here Cain breaks down how American business culture has transformed over the decades. 

16. “The rise of industrial America was a major force behind this cultural evolution.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

17. “In 1790, only 3 percent of Americans lived in cities; in 1840, only 8 percent did; by 1920, more than a third of the country were urbanites.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

18. “The nation quickly developed from an agricultural society of little houses on the prairie to an urbanized, “the business of America is business” powerhouse.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

19. “By 1920, popular self-help guides had changed their focus from inner virtue to outer charm;  ‘to know what to say and how to say it,’ as one manual put it.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

20. “America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality and opened up a Pandora’s Box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

Famous Quiet quotes about successfully running a business

We close our list with these Quiet quotes about running a successful team. 

21. “If you don’t have all the facts, and often you won’t, should you wait to act until you’ve collected as much data as possible?” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

22. “Even businesses that employ many artists, designers, and other imaginative types often display a preference for extroversion.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

23. “In the book Iconoclast, there’s a company that successfully asks employees to share ideas through an online ‘idea market,’ as a way of focusing on substance rather than style.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

24. “If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day.” — Susan Cain, Quiet 

25. “One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues’ failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability.’ — Susan Cain, Quiet 

What is your personality type?

In Quiet, Cain says we must expand our vision when it comes to how we see personality. 

Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Let us know in the comments below. 

You might also enjoy these shy quotes.