167 Quotes About Shyness

I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.

The answers will be given to those who are bold enough to ask.

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

Intelligence is suffocated by things such as cowardice and diffidence.

There's a difference between disclosing that which is only your business and hiding away from the world and not seeing, shining and sharing your magic.

When you’ve had a life of overthinking, you have the same reaction time and time again. Shyness becomes habitual. When you’re put in an unfamiliar situation, all you want to do is retreat and hide by default. You watch but don’t participate. You listen but don’t respond. You read, but rarely comment. You take a photo, but you rarely post. You write, but you rarely publish. All of this is because your overthinking mind cannot stop thinking about how you will be perceived by the outside world.

Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be, or what they may discover us to be if they see through our pretenses. Most people, most of the time, have a profound and unhappy awareness of the contrast between what they are and what they ought to be.

I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.

From the deepest silence between us arose uncertain, utterly vague and, as it were, whispered varieties on the theme ‘smile’.