The Highly Sensitive Person Quotes

“The way to come to tolerate and then enjoy being involved in the world is by being in the world.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You

“With sensitive children, physical blows or traumas aren't required to make them afraid of the dark.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“We do not just have an idea of how someone else feels; we actually feel that way ourselves to some extent.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Being so eager to please, we’re not easy to liberate. We’re too aware of what others need. Yet our intuition also picks up on the inner question that must be answered. These two strong, conflicting currents may buffet us for years. Don’t worry if your progress toward liberation is slow, for it’s almost inevitable.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“how will you feel going to your grave without having tried?”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“We make it especially hard for others to observe our trait because we are so responsive to our environments that we can be something like chameleons when around others, doing whatever it takes to fit in. I”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“D is for depth of processing. Our fundamental characteristic is that we observe and reflect before we act. We process everything more, whether we are conscious of it or not. O is for being easily overstimulated, because if you are going to pay more attention to everything, you are bound to tire sooner. E is for giving emphasis to our emotional reactions and having strong empathy which among other things helps us notice and learn. S is for being sensitive to all the subtleties around us.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“I believe in aristocracy, though—if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power … but … of the sensitive, the considerate.… Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure … E. M. Forster, “What I Believe,”         in Two Cheers for Democracy             Contents   Cover   Title Page   Copyright   Dedication   Epigraph   Preface   Are You Highly Sensitive? A Self-Test   1  The Facts About Being Highly Sensitive: A (Wrong) Sense of Being Flawed   2  Digging Deeper: Understanding Your Trait for All That It Is”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Survive and Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Carl Jung held that the habitually introverted (most HSPs) turn their energy inward to protect their treasured inner life from being overwhelmed by the outer world. But Jung pointed out that the more successfully introverted you are, the more pressure builds in the unconscious to compensate for the inward turning. It is as if the house becomes filled with bored (but probably gifted) kids who eventually find their way out the back door. This pent-up energy often lands on one person (or place or thing), which becomes all-important to the poor upended introvert. You have fallen intensely in love, and it really has less to do with the other person and more to do with how long you have delayed reaching out.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“In an aggressive culture, non-HSPs are favored, and that fact will be obvious everywhere. Even in the study of pumpkinseed sunfish described above, the U.S. biologists writing the article described the sunfish that went into the traps as the “bold” fish, who behaved “normally.” The others were “shy.” But were the untrapped fish really feeling shy? Why not smug? After all, one could as easily describe them as the smart sunfish, the others as the stupid ones. No one knows what the sunfish felt, but the biologists were certain because their culture had taught them to be. Those who hesitate are afraid; those who do not are normal. (Science is always filtered through culture—the true image is not lost but sure can be tinted.) Here’s a good study to remember: Research comparing elementary school children in Shanghai to those in Canada found that sensitive, quiet children in China were among the most respected by their peers, and in Canada they were among the least respected. HSPs growing up in cultures in which they are not respected have to be affected by this lack of respect.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You

“For aggressive societies to survive, however, they always need that priest-judge-advisor class as well. This class balances the kings and warriors (as the U.S. Supreme Court balances the president and his armed forces). It is a more thoughtful group, often acting to check the impulses of the warrior-kings. Since the advisor class often proves right, its members are respected as counselors, historians, teachers, scholars, and the upholders of justice. They have the foresight, for example, to look out for the well-being of those common folks on whom the society depends, those who grow the food and raise the children. They warn against hasty wars and bad use of the land.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“As adults, HSPs tend to have just the right personalities for inner work and healing. Generally speaking, your keen intuition helps you uncover the most important hidden factors. You have greater access to your own unconscious and so a greater sense of others' and how you were affected. You can develop a good sense of the process itself - when to push, when to back off. You have curiosity about inner life. Above all, you have integrity. You remain committed to the process of individuation no matter how difficult it is to face certain moments, certain wounds, certain facts.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“it is still the case that he “can look in her eyes and disappear.” He may not know how to live with her, but he will always know he loves her”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You

“A teacher of meditation once told the story of a man who wanted nothing to do with the stress of life, so he retreated to a cave to meditate day and night for the rest of his life. But soon he came out again, driven to overwhelming distress by the sound of the dripping of water in his cave. The moral is that, at least to some extent, the stresses will always be there, for we bring our sensitivity with us. What we need is a new way of living with the stressors.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“It is not surprising that highly sensitive children, and adults, too, have a hard time with sleep and report more vivid, alarming, “archetypal” dreams. With the coming of darkness, subtle sounds and shapes begin to rule the imagination, and HSPs sense them more. There are also the unfamiliar experiences of the day—some only half-noticed, some totally repressed. All of them swirl in the mind just as we are relaxing the conscious mind so that we can fall asleep. Falling asleep, staying asleep, and going back to sleep when awakened require an ability to soothe oneself, to feel safe in the world.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Being so eager to please, we’re not easy to liberate. We’re too aware of what others need.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Some of you may be struggling with discovering your vocation and feeling a little frustrated that your intuition is not helping you more. Alas, intuition can also stand in your way because it makes you aware of too many inner voices speaking for too many different possibilities.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Our culture has an idea of competition in the pursuit of excellence that can make anyone not striving for the top feel like a worthless, non-productive bystander. This applies not only to one's career but even to one's leisure.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“We make it especially hard for others to observe our trait when it means we are observing and not "behaving," at least at first. Further, we are so responsive to our environments that we can be something like chameleons when around others, doing whatever it takes to fit in.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“We cannot “play” until all the details of our work are done. The details are like little needles of arousal poking us. But that can make it difficult to relax and have some fun.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“In the first twenty years we are given our curriculum. In the next twenty we study it.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“When seeing photos of their loved ones being unhappy, sensitive persons also showed more activation in areas suggesting they wanted to do something, to act, even more than in areas involving empathy (perhaps we learn to cool down our intense empathy in order to help). But overall, brain activation indicating empathy was stronger in HSPs”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Another kind of HSP could potentially have an even stronger pause-to-check system but an activation system that is also very strong—just not quite as strong. This kind of HSP would be both very curious and very cautious, bold yet anxious, easily bored yet easily overaroused. The optimal level of arousal is a narrow range. One could say there is a constant power struggle between the advisor and the impulsive, expansive warrior within the person.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“just know” how things got to be the way they are or how they are going to turn out. This is that “sixth sense” people talk about. It can be wrong, of course, just as your eyes and ears can be wrong, but your intuition is right often enough that HSPs tend to be visionaries, highly intuitive artists, or inventors, as well as more conscientious, cautious, and wise people.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“the fear that now your “fatal flaw” will reveal itself fully as you fail to make the”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“the only real difference between racist, sexist people and those who are not is the conscious effort that the latter make to counteract their learned-in-childhood, unconscious prejudices.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You

“A real man or woman is whatever any man or woman is at those times when he or she is living authentically, in accord with his or her true self and temperament. There is no truer definition of your gender than you.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You

“Perhaps you had an overprotective, needy caretaker who really wanted a child very dependent and never able to leave. Or the caretaker’s own sense of strength or self-worth was bolstered by being stronger and so needed.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Overaroused HSPs tend to substitute “freeze” for the “fight or flight” response.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“What is highly arousing for most people causes an HSP to become very frazzled indeed, until they reach a shutdown point called “transmarginal inhibition.” Transmarginal inhibition was first discussed around the turn of the century by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who was convinced that the most basic inherited difference among people was how soon they reach this shutdown point and that the quick-to-shut-down have a fundamentally different type of nervous system.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You