Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality ... is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.

Opposites attract, and I think temperament is so fundamental that you end up craving someone of the opposite temperament to complete you.

What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.

Solitude matters. And for some people it's the air they breathe.

There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.

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

You're told that you're in your head too much, a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.

Introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly.

It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world.

I'm continually amazed by how many people who appear to be extroverts are actually introverts.

Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances.

If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm you'll never enjoy the sunshine.

The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.

It was the best 10 years of my career, in fact they are the only team I ever actually played for. That’s what happens when you play for Everton, you forget the rest, the rest means nothing.

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

Invest your life in what you love.

'Chasing Amy' was an amazing role, but then after that, I went and did 'Big Daddy' and you're the girlfriend or you're the best friend. I wasn't getting the Nicole Kidman roles.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication.

It's never about what YOU want.