Sensory Processing Sensitivity Quotes

“Am I too much for the world, or is the world too much for me?”
― Kelli Jae Baeli, Too Much World

“HSPs do more of that which makes humans different from other animals: We imagine possibilities. We humans, and HSPs especially, are acutely aware of the past and future.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“How discouraging to watch your friends enjoying something you are too afraid to try. Do not underestimate such discouragement. It can be just as present in adulthood as you see friends taking on careers, travel, moves, and relationships that you would fear. Yet deep inside you also know you have the same or more talent, desire, and potential.”
― 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

“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

“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

“You can be, should be, and need to be involved in the world. It truly needs you.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“It was as if [highly sensitive subjects] found it natural to look beyond their cultural expectations to how things "really are.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“You and I are learning to see our trait as a neutral thing—useful in some situations, not in others—but our culture definitely does not see it, or any trait as neutral. The anthropologist Margaret Mead explained it well. Although a culture’s newborns will show a broad range of inherited temperaments, only a narrow band of these, a certain type, will be the ideal. The ideal personality is embodied, in Mead's words, in 'every thread of the social fabric—in the care of the young child, the games the children play, the songs the people sing, the political organization, the religious observance, the art and the philosophy.' Other traits are ignored, discouraged, or if all else fails, ridiculed.
What is the ideal in our culture? Movies, advertisements, the design of public spaces, all tell us we should be as tough as the Terminator, as stoic as Clint Eastwood, as outgoing as Goldie Hawn. We should be pleasantly stimulated by bright lights, noise, a gang of cheerful fellows hanging out in a bar. If we are feeling overwhelmed and sensitive, we can always take a painkiller.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Envy can wake us up to one of two truths: We want something and better do something about it while we still can, or we want something and just cannot have it.
[…]
If your envy is strong and you decide you want to do something, you probably can.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Think about the impact on you of not being ideal for your culture. It has to affect you—not only how others have treated you but also how you have come to treat yourself.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“But now you know the specific cause of your difficulty with [certain tasks] and can explore ways around the overarousal they create. So there's really very little that you can't do if you find a way to do it in your own style.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“[…] How will you feel going to your grave without having tried?”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“The world needs to coax more such folks into public positions. But if they don't coax us, we had better volunteer now and then.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“And while a difficult past may seem at first to hamper our living our life's purpose, sometimes it serve the purpose, too. Or it is the purpose—to fully experience and understand a certain kind of human problem.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Or as one friend of mine put it, '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