Best 116 quotes in «shyness quotes» category

My days of torment were over, but the damage was done. I conflated the bullies and my bathroom accidents with an inchoate sense that something was wrong with me. I broadcast my sense of otherness through my slumped posture, downcast expression, and extreme timidity. Kids at school called weird so often that after a while I believed them. I hid myself behind a curtain of tangled hair.

My face is like some sort of bashful chameleon, flashing red at any sign of social interaction. Stupid face.

Nothing is as irritating to a shy man as a confident girl.

No longer did she look like a shy little maid who was trained to censor her thought before it reached her mouth. These past few days had turned her into a reserved yet intelligent young woman.

Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly.

Now you're uncomfortable?' Leander smirked, 'After all that?' 'That's different,' Axton said, sitting up and pulling a pillow to his chest, unconsciously hiding. 'Fine,' Leander said, rolling his eyes, 'You have these stupid gold eyes, something something, I love looking into them, PS: fuck you. Is that better?

Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: 'try on' a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the 'fit' and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies' dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. 'Mariam,' he said as if by way of explanation, 'has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.' On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others.

She had spoken it; but she trembled when it was done, conscious that her words were listened to, and daring not even to try to observe their effect.

She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber . . . forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers. . . . But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter. Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly lonely. It was important to have a really good book.

She's given up trying to stand out.

Shyness blocks and breaks routes toward the fraternizing with others and success of career and life.

Shyness is a safety mechanism to save you from the fear of being wrong, and the ridicule that comes along with it. As human beings, we crave love, acceptance, and belonging. As part of this, we fear the opposite: shame and ridicule. If we lack confidence in ourselves, we constantly fear this—and seek external validation.

Silence has always been my default mode—my best defense against the rest of the world.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them." (Initiation)

rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and rather too assertive

[Schulz] came to see that the better part of his shyness was really vanity, or self-centeredness. "Shyness is an illusion," he would say, late in life. "If you get out and do something and talk to people, you don't have to be shy. Shyness is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you are the only person in the world; that how you look and what you do is of any importance.

She didn't understand how other people did it, how they just strolled right up to strangers and started conversations -- how they made themselves into people strangers would ever want to meet. She wasn't shy, not exactly. She was afraid.

She talked to her, listened to her, read to her; and the tranquillity of such evenings, her perfect security in such a tête-à-tête from any sound of unkindness, was unspeakably welcome to a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments.

She yearned to be admired, and feared to be insulted; and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined to miss both these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at second hand in the experiences of her more privileged friends.

Shyness is born from a lack of self-confidence and fear of ridicule. In my case it latched on to the young boy who didn’t have confidence in himself or his abilities after being belittled by his first-grade teacher. Introversion, on the other hand, is a tremendous gift that allows for inquisitive curiosity about life. Introversion created in this young boy a fascination with life, nature, science, creativity, and imagination.

Shyness is cute in children, but disgusting in adults.

Shyness in the young may be charming to look at but is painful to the one who suffers it.

Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.

Shy people are my favorites. The unmistakable glint of shyness in someone's eyes can mesmerize me for years!

Some people are extroverts only when they are drunk.

Tess is a bit shy," her mother used to tell people in an audible whisper, her hand over her mouth. "Gets it from her father, I'm afraid." Tess had heard the cheerful disrespect in her mother's voice and had come to believe that any form of shyness was wrong- morally wrong, in fact. You should want to go to parties. You should want to be surrounded by people. No wonder she felt so ashamed of her shyness, as if it were an embarrassing physical ailment that needed to be hidden at all costs.

So, what's up with you and Damian?" Helena asks. "What do you mean?" I can feel the hear of a blush coloring on my cheeks. I can't ever seem to not show how I feel. It's becoming pretty annoying.

The comedy in our lives was those first few weeks we lived together in Paris: Our bodies desired one another, our souls opened for one another. We experienced all of the happiness and anguish of first love. Those first few weeks in Paris, we barely touched lips; yet the few times we did, it had the force of a collision of stars.

The misfortune of solitary and timid people - who are timid from self-consciousness - is just that, though they have eyes and indeed open them wide, they see nothing, or see everything in a false light, as though through coloured spectacles.

The love of books was an instant connection, and a true boon for a girl who tended toward shyness, because it was a source of endless conversation.

The idea that you are not good enough and that people will not like you is something that has been ingrained into your mind over many years. You have hundreds of experiences that you can call up as evidence of the fact that people will not like you -- and that things will not turn out well. These ideas are incredibly convincing. They compel us to hesitate, to shy away, and to avoid the situations -- and people -- that we find frightening. This sets up a reinforcing cycle, where we avoid reaching out, don't get good responses from others as a result, and then gain further evidence that we are not worthy. In order to truly overcome your social anxiety at a deep, gut level, you must repeatedly take bold action. It is only through trying something new, and with a different perspective, that you learn to see the world and the people around you in a different light.

The mind speaks louder than the voice.

The more you talk, the less people listen.

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.

The ones who stay unnoticed often see the most. They live out other people's lives, since their own are so unremarkable...

This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache.

There were other things,too, to ask him. Always she tries to be less forward. Always she tried to find the right thing to say and didn't trust the etiquette pendulum swinging in her head, so she simply said nothing, which was perceived either as painful shyness of haughtiness. Dasha never had that problem. She just said the first thing that came into her head. Tatiana knew she needed to rust her inner voice more. It was certainly loud enough

When he was younger, he used the slightest opportunity to slip away from people, without his being able to understand very clearly why he did so: a longing to break free and to breathe in the fresh air?

What he feared the most was that all this hiding had made it impossible for him to ever be found again.

When I realized that I was an introvert and what that meant, I actually became more outgoing, more confident in social situations, and began to enjoy scenarios I used to find unbearable. Why? Because, in understanding what I needed with respect to replenishing my energy, I was able to set limits and boundaries that freed me to be more engaged.

und diese war so lebendig und so gesprächig und machte sich aus seiner Gegenwart und aus seiner Schüchternheit so wenig, daß er unbehilflich und ein wenig beleidigt die Fühler einzog und sich verkroch, wie eine vom Wagenrad gestreifte Wegschnecke.

Verlegenheid is als je je afkeert van iets wat je wilt. Schaamte is als je je afkeert van iets wat je niet wilt.

Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!" How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am.

We met a great many other interesting people, among them Lewis Carroll, author of the immortal "Alice"--but he was only interesting to look at, for he was the silliest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met except "Uncle Remus.

Your shyness alone will bring you more emotional and material losses than all of your other negative attributes.

You're not shy. You just like who you like.

When you get shy, you’re simply thinking of yourself. Stop it. Step out of yourself.

And like the old stereotype, I overcame my shyness by making my friends laugh.

A lot of vices that I've had over the years were always to make up for some sort of character deficiency, one of them being shyness.

Among the wealthy, generosity is often merely a kind of shyness.