Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity the theory of relativity W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Chopin’s nocturnes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time

exigencies

Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame.

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again. —ANAÏS NIN

Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. —LAO ZI, The Way of Lao Zi

a marker of how far we’ve come—and not in a good way—since

Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and cranking up the stereo.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. —CARL JUNG

Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.