Listening Quotes

From listening comes wisdom and from speaking repentance.

A good listener is not only popular everywhere but after a while he knows something.

Each of us has one. Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.

Terry Tempest Williams

Where the rivers meetyou tell me of your black dreams.Your memories make me uneasy.But I listen because I knowmy listening, like all other listeningallows you to heal.

Holly Lynn Payne

The art of hearing what somebody has to say is actually, listening.

Colette Ruland Parrino

If God places a child before you, and you are too busy to wield either a positive or negative influence...you just did the later! You communicated that the child doesn't matter and isn't important.

Wess Stafford

She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.

Henry James

What good was speaking when I'd determined none of the world listened to one another, especially not when a woman was speaking.

Leanna Renee Hieber

...you listen first with the ears - then, you wait and listen for what your heart feels - then you consider what they've said - then, you reply ...

John Geddes

Like most so-called debates between liberals and conservatives, they weren’t interested in listening or responding to each other. They were solely concerned with making sound bites.

Bob Frey

How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?

Alexander McCall Smith

Surround yourself with music. Just be sure to turn the radio on.

Lisa M. Cronkhite

Just because someone doesn't respond...doesn't mean they are not Listening.

M (Michelle) Carithers

It comes down to this: If you want to be seen, heard and understood in the most genuine way possible, be open to the possiblity of vulnerability. Allow yourself to be open. I know it’s a scary place, a place very few people dare to venture, but just try it. Try moving the masks away and really looking at a person the next time they engaged in conversation with you.

Leigh Hershkovich

I'd much rather hear someone's unique interpretation of their own experience. Those who negate or override someone else's experience in order to one-up them or to show off their own knowledge or perceived abilities are in truth showing off their lack of listening skills and wisdom.

Tonya Sheridan

The best listeners are often those with the quietest heart.

Marie Sabillo

Auntie Yang is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.

Amy Tan

Our civic life is heavily marked—indeed, pocked—by debates in which each side is so certain of its position that any movement is effectively impossible. For that matter, debate—in its original sense of “to consider something, to deliberate”—is impossible. We wind up with so much sound and fury and nothing gained.

Leah Hager Cohen

The intelligent talk and the wise listen.

Raheel Farooq

You really pay attention to things, don’t you?” “Just with people I care about,” he said with a smile, “I think I get that from my mother. She was a really kind and giving person from what I remember, and she used to tell me, ‘Don’t just listen to people, hear them.’ I never forgot that.” “Wow,” I responded, “That’s so true. How many people really hear what we say?

Jackie Pilossoph

Elizabeth was so sweet this afternoon trying to show P.B. his sitting room. He became absorbed in some jungle prints along the passage and would not come. The corners of her mouth went down after the third attempt & putting both hands on his shoulders she said angelically: ‘Bertie do listen to me.’ He kissed her and came at once.

William Shawcross

I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there.

Haruki Murakami

They listened more than they talked, but that was the way of wise men and women.

Lee Goff

It 'appens to be true. An' if'n yew want ter stay moi friend, yew'd best 'old yer turpitudinous twaddle of a tongue an' listen fer once.

Peter St. John

Samuel finally understood the sound of the wind after all these years: The winds were a chorus of the prairie’s ever-present heartaches.

Andrew Galasetti

I always listen to what I can leave out.

Miles Davis

I love to write and to get to know the people who are listening.

Emilie Autumn

The only problem is the heart is quiet. It takes a very special kind of person to hear what the heart says. Most can't hear it at all and they have to guess. There are a lot of people walking around just guessing.

Suzanne Palmieri

..."But what I like doing best is Nothing." "How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time. "Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, What are you going to do Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and you go and do it." "Oh, I see," said Pooh. "This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing right now." "Oh, I see," said Pooh again. "It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear and not bothering." "Oh!" said Pooh.

A.A. Milne

solutions have a voice - the art is knowing how to listen

Gino Norris

I listened; I wrote; I learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to pick one kind of pedagogy over all others, I pick listening. It breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed limits; it takes one into another's life, her hard times and, if there is any, her joy too.

Andrea Dworkin

To hear is one thing, to know is another.

Rudyard Kipling

Listening is an act of love. When you listen to people, you are communicating non-verbally that they are important to you.

Jim George

Sometimes you are not supposed to say anything. Just listen. Let the other person spit it out.

Zane raised his brow. “Didn’t I say that yesterday?” he asked, forcinghimself to be patient. Somehow.“You say that like you think I listen to you,” Ty responded instantly, asmile pulling at his lips.

Abigail Roux

When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another's need to speak, be our silent statement.

Bryant McGill

If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.

Charles Olson

Give me a half hour's conversation. I will know more than I will reading 20 magazines.

Joseph Kennedy

A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.

Richard Rohr

It's a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.

Barbara Kingsolver

In my experience when a friend unloaded about a boyfriend or spouse, the listener soaked up the complaint and remembered it long after the speaker had forgiven the offense.

Sonia Sotomayor

In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn’t do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the feeble and the young—-well, not even the young anymore—-need to obey. Funny, because the root of the word obey is from the French verb meaning “to listen, or to give ear to.” It was never intended as a militant word, but one of hearing, of understanding. Of getting it. For a world obsessed with staying in constant communication, we aren’t really very good listeners.

Heather Choate Davis

If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical accent. It expresses the fact that, in general, we are not at all ready to hear things in there own being, that they are subjected to man's calculus and to his domination of nature through the rationality of science.

GADAMER

You can talk all you want about freedom of speech, but it's freedom of hearing that counts.

Tommy Smothers

If I tell you I am upset about everything that's going on around me, you will probably ask me why, half listening, half wandering away in your own train of thoughts...If I tell you I am happy, you will probably not bother to know why, congratulating me and forgetting..I should rather tell you I am fine, satisfied, you will probably tell me your own issues then, for which I will be all ears

Sanhita Baruah

When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experienced this sensitive, empathic, concentrated listening.

Carl R. Rogers

I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted.In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone. I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.("The Graveyard Reader")

Theodore Sturgeon

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.

Marcel Proust

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

Kin Hubbard

There is a saying that, paper is more patient than man.

Anne Frank

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their vo

Helen Dunmore

It takes courage to listen to your inner knowing … But once you hear that knowing, making a decision becomes fairly easy.

Joseph Jaworski

Listening is the key. The whole objective of a howl is to be heard.

Amit Pandey

I’ll listen if you want me to... But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don’t mind that, I don’t mind listening.

Ayn Rand

Personal truth differs from one person to the next, so how can truth itself be a constant? At least we can listen to each other in truth.

Jay Woodman

He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.

Robert A. Caro

More than anything else, your people want you to listen to them.

Sunday Adelaja

We talk, even if no one listens, because we never know when someone will.

Caitlyn Paige

To listen to what I'd heard - as if I'd already learned everything I needed.

Sarah J Maas

To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements, or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, to welcome, to accept.Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings. The beauty of listening is that, those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their own true selves. Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

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Listening Quotes

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