Shyness

Shyness (also called diffidence) is the feeling of apprehension, lack of comfort, or awkwardness especially when a person is in proximity to other people. This commonly occurs in new situations or with unfamiliar people.

Quotes

• Narrated 'Aisha: I said, "O Allah's Apostle! A virgin feels shy." He said, "Her consent is (expressed by) her silence."
  • Aisha, Sahih Bukhari 7:62:68 [1]

• He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing. He was too diffident to do justice to himself; but when his natural shyness was overcome, his behaviour gave every indication of an open, affectionate heart.
  • Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811).

• At the time, I believed that shyness was very important, but now I know that shyness is one of the evils one must try to overcome, that in reality to be shy doesn't matter—it is like so many other things to which one gives an exaggerated importance.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights (1980). English translation by Eliot Weinberger

• Shyness is shit. It isn’t cute or feminine or appealing. It’s torment, and it’s shit.
  • Octavia Butler, "Positive Obsession", in Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995).

• He's not an asshole, he's just shy. I think you have shy/asshole confusion, my friend.
  • Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 2, Episode 6 (2001).

• The shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him. He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate his misery. He frightens other people as much as they frighten him. He acts like a damper upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits become, in his presence, depressed and nervous.
  • Jerome K. Jerome, "On Being Shy", in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886).

• Shyness is just egotism out of its depth.
  • Penelope Keith (b. 1939), British actress. Daily Mail (UK) newspaper, 27th June 1988.

• I am the son
  And the heir
  Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
  • Johnny Marr and Morrissey, How Soon Is Now?, Hatful of Hollow (1985)

• Shyness is nice, and
  Shyness can stop you
  From doing all the things in life
  You'd like to.
  • Johnny Marr and Morrissey, Ask, The World Won't Listen (1986).

• A shy man means a lonely man—a man cut off from all companionship, all sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it. Between him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable barrier—a strong, invisible wall, that, trying in vain to scale, he but bruises himself against. He sees the pleasant faces, and hears the pleasant voices on the other side, but he cannot stretch his hand across to grasp another hand. He stands watching the merry groups, and he longs to speak, and to claim kindred with them. But they pass him by, chatting gaily to one another, and he cannot stay them. He tries to reach them, but his prison walls move with him, and hem him in on every side. In the busy street, in the crowded room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amidst the many or amidst the few; wherever men congregate together, wherever the music of human speech is heard, and human thought is flashed from human eyes, there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands apart. His soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not. The iron mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man beneath is never seen. Genial words and hearty greetings are ever rising to his lips, but they die away in unheard whispers behind the steel clamps.
  • Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow/On being shy, (1886)