Susan Cain Quotes

Some people are genetically programmed to be difficult.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

Personality traits form at an early age and are fixed by early adulthood. Many important things about you change over the course of your lifetime, but your personality isn't one of them.

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.

I have two kids and they were by no means blank slates. One is exactly like me, one is exactly like my wife.

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.

No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament".

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.

Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.

Personality, too, is destiny.

Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

With my background and genetic makeup,buddy, you're lucky I'm as normal as I am. (Katra Agrotera)

I think it's fair to say that my temperament is steady - and on the buoyant side.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is - the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I'll never get over my awe of that.

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single part of the body.

It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

I'm obviously not going to give you everything about my whole life, but as far as my personality, you see me all the time from watching the games.

Attitude and personality are as important as experience and ability.

Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.. we do so in a small way everytime we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too.

The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.

Children will grow up substantially what they are by nature--and only that.

I was more wishy-washy in the first 12 years of my career, just because that was my personality.