Quotations: Listening

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.
Marcel Achard

Dance as if no one were watching, Sing as if no one were listening, And live every day as if it were your last
Anon

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Arthur

Spend time every day listening to what your muse is trying to tell you
Saint Bartholomew

Really listening and suspending one's own judgment is necessary in order to understand other people on their own terms... This is a process that requires trust and builds trust.
Mary Field Belenky

Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.
Marcus Brigstocke

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.
Dr. Joyce Brothers

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.
Leo F. Buscaglia

The world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.
Joseph Campbell

No one ever listened himself out of a job.
Calvin Coolidge

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
E. E. Cummings

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.
Hansell B. Duckett

Nature has given to men one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.
Epictetus

Refuse to fall down. If you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down, lift your heart toward heaven like a hungry beggar, ask that it be filled and it will be filled. You may be pushed down. You may be kept from rising. But no one can keep you from lifting your heart toward heaven-only you. It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says nothing good came of this is not yet listening.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If we have listening ears, God speaks to us in our own language, whatever that language be
Mahatma Gandhi

There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves.
Albert Guinon

It takes a great man to make a good listener.
Sir Arthur Helps

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway

With the gift of listening comes the gift of healing.
Catherine de Hueck

Remember there's always a voice saying the right thing to you somewhere if you'll only listen for it.
Thomas Hughes

If you spend more time asking appropriate questions rather than giving answers or opinions, your listening skills will increase
Brian Koslow

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Fran Lebowitz

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.
Harriet Lerner

Some plague the people with too long sermons; for the faculty of listening is a tender thing, and soon becomes weary and satiated.
Martin Luther

Years ago, I tried to top everybody, but I don't anymore, I realized it was killing conversation. When you're always trying for a topper you aren't really listening. It ruins communication.
Groucho Marx

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Karl Menninger

Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.
John Muir

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure
Henri Nouwen

Set up the listening. Prepare who you are talking to for what you want them to hear. Get people to listen as a possibility rather than a problem.
Mal Pancoast

It you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
Marge Piercy

Know how to listen, and you'll profit even from those who talk badly.
Plutarch

Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening.
Dorothy Sarnoff

When I don't like a piece of music, I make a point of listening to it more closely
Florent Schmitt

Live among men as if God beheld you; speak to God as if men were listening.
Seneca

And therefore 'tis called a sensible tale, and this cuff was but to knock at your ear, and beseech listening.
William Shakespeare

There's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.
Chuck Sigars

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Dame Edith Sitwell

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Edith Sitwell

Let me listen to me and not to them.
Gertrude Stein

Trees are Earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
Rabindranath Tagore

No siren did ever so charm the ear of the listener as the listening ear has charmed the soul of the siren.
Sir Henry Taylor

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
Lewis Thomas

Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.
Frank Tyger

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
Brenda Ueland

I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.
Bill Watterson

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
Rebecca West

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