Quotes About Listening
1. When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
2. Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.
3. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.
4. Sometimes all a person wants is an empathetic ear; all he or she needs is to talk it out. Just offering a listening ear and an understanding heart for his or her suffering can be a big comfort.
5. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
6. This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.
7. Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears.
8. If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.
9. We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.
10. Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.
11. It takes a great man to be a good listener.
12. there’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
13. We have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionally.
14. You’re short on ears and long on mouth.
15. Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.
16. It’s not at all hard to understand a person; it’s only hard to listen without bias.
17. Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.
18. The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.
19. The word ‘listen’ contains the same letters as the word ‘silent’.
20. The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.
21. Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening
22. I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
23. …he asked, “Where are you today, right now?”
Eagerly, I started talking about myself. However, I noticed that I was still being sidetracked from getting answers to my questions. Still, I told him about my distant and recent past and about my inexplicable depressions. He listened patiently and intently, as if he had all the time in the world, until I finished several hours later.
“Very well,” he said. “But you still have not answered my question about where you are.
24. Sometimes its not the strength but gentleness that cracks the hardest shells.Sometimes its not the strength but gentleness that cracks the hardest shells.
25. Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still.
26. …most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.
27. The more you talk about them, the more important they will feel. The more you listen to them, the more important you will make them feel.
28. I’ve learned to get really good at this – say one thing when I’m thinking about something else, act like I’m listening when I’m not, pretend to be calm and happy when I’m really freaking out. It’s one of the skills you perfect as you get older
29. An appreciative listener is always stimulating.
30. You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.
31. If there is no communication then there is no respect. If there is no respect then there is no caring. If there is no caring then there is no understanding. If there is no understanding then there is no compassion. If there is no compassion then there is no empathy. If there is no empathy then there is no forgiveness. If there is no forgiveness then there is no kindness. If there is no kindness then there is no honesty. If there is no honesty then there is no love. If there is no love then God doesn’t reside there. If God doesn’t reside there then there is no peace. If there is no peace then there is no happiness. If there is no happiness —-then there IS CONFLICT BECAUSE THERE IS NO COMMUNICATION!
32. Friends are those rare people who ask how we are, and then wait to hear the answer.
33. For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
34. That was the trouble with explaining with words. If you explained with gunpowder, people listened.
35. Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
36. Do more listening than talking; talk more about them than about you.
37. It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak and another to hear.
38. When someone tells you something big, it’s like you’re taking money from them, and there’s no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.
39. Listening is an attitude of the heart, a genuine desire to be with another which both attracts and heals. (attr to J. Isham)
40. To assess the quality of thoughts of people, don’t listen to their words, but watch their actions.
41. The humble listen to their brothers and sisters because they assume they have something to learn. They are open to correction, and they become wiser through it.
42. We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.
43. “Nothing changes until people decide to do the things they must, in order to bring about peace.
44. Never allow your ego to diminish your ability to listen.
45. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
46. Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what’s going on, our ears don’t have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re about to hear, it’s always too late.
47. There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. This is no fulfillment of our obligation, and it is certain that here too our attitude toward our brother only reflects our relationship to God. It is little wonder that we are no longer capable of the greatest service of listening that God has committed to us, that of hearing our brother’s confession, if we refuse to give ear to our brother on lesser subjects. Secular education today is aware that often a person can be helped merely by having someone who will listen to him seriously, and upon this insight it has constructed its own soul therapy, which has attracted great numbers of people, including Christians. But Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.
48. There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. This is no fulfillment of our obligation, and it is certain that here too our attitude toward our brother only reflects our relationship to God. It is little wonder that we are no longer capable of the greatest service of listening that God has committed to us, that of hearing our brother’s confession, if we refuse to give ear to our brother on lesser subjects. Secular education today is aware that often a person can be helped merely by having someone who will listen to him seriously, and upon this insight it has constructed its own soul therapy, which has attracted great numbers of people, including Christians. But Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God
49. I had trouble listening to adults who didn’t really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.
50. How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires. And is there any other form of listening? Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby? Listening has importance only when on is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?
51. You can’t fake listening. It shows.
52. Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs a considerable practice in listening.
53. You may see all that is around you
But you may feel nothing at all.
So try and close your eyes so tight
And listen to the night time fall.
54. Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity.
55. Be aware of the high notes, of the blissful faces and their soft messages, and listen for the silent message of a highly decorated gift.
56. Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.
57. Trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?
58. Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.
59. You can listen to silence, Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.
…
You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes – sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.
60. I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you’d meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.
