Quote Lady's Quotes by Subject, Listening

Listening

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.--Robert Louis Stevenson (Reflections and Remarks on Human Life)
Be a good listener; Your ears will never get you in trouble.--Frank Tyger
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.--James Baldwin
Deep listening is miraculous for both listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand.--Sue Patton Thoele
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.--Robert Frost
Effective listening requires more than hearing the words transmitted. It demands that you find meaning and understanding in what is being said. After all, meanings are not in the words, but in the people.-–Herb Cohen
The first duty of love is to listen.--Paul Tillich
A good judge doesn't know the strength of the plaintiff's case until he's heard the defense.--William Sheffield
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while, he knows something.--Wilson Mizner
A good listener tries to understand thoroughly what the other person is saying. In the end he may disagree sharply, but before he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is he is disagreeing with.--Kenneth A. Wells
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.--Henry David Thoreau
The greatest motivational act one person can do for another is to listen.--Roy E. Moody
How can we communicate love? I think three things are involved. We must reach out to a person, make contact. We must listen with the heart, be sensitive to the other's needs. We must respond in a language that the person can understand. Many of us do all the talking. We must learn to listen and to keep on listening.--Princess Pale Moon
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.--Ernest Hemingway
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.--Lillian Hellman
If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been.--Robert H. Schuller
If you want people to listen, you have to have a platform to speak from , and that is excellence in what you do.--Bill Pollard (speech at Seattle Pacific University, ca. 1997)
If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever-more wonders.--Andrew Harvey
I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility.--Nikki Giovanni ("Griots" Racism 101)
It is much harder to criticize or to be angry with someone who wants to listen to you rather than lecture you or get angry in turn. Let people know that you are listening, that you know their pain, and that the message of respect for life also says that their lives are precious, no matter how strongly they disagree with you.--Frank Pavone (Proclaiming the Message of Life)
It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of supersophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.--Erma Bombeck (If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?)
It takes a great man to make a good listener.--Arthur Helps
It's a mistake to think we listen only with our ears. It's much more important to listen with the mind, the eyes, the body, and the heart. Unless you truly want to understand the other person, you'll never be able to listen.--Mark Herndon
I've never learned anything while I was talking.--Larry King
Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.--Plutarch
Leadership to me means duty, honor, country. It means character, and it means listening from time to time.--George Bush
"Listen!" ... I could spend the rest of my life pondering on the implications of that one word. It plunges me at once into a personal relationship.--Esther de Waal (A Life-Giving Way)
Listen to everything, forget much, correct little.--Pope John XXIII
Listen to the mustn'ts, child.
Listen to the don'ts.
Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts.
Listen to the never haves,
then listen close to me...
Anything can happen, child.
Anything can be.--Shel Silverstein
Listen to your heart.
Listen to your instincts.
Listen to inner voice.
It is your true self.
It will guide you to make the right choices.
--Lailah Gifty Akita
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. You can see that when you think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.--Brenda Ueland (Strength to Your Sword Arm)
Listening is about becoming vulnerable, about letting the defense mechanisms fall away that deafen us or influence what we take in. It is about humility before life, which is over and above us. Indeed, we can see that to be oriented toward life means to be listening.--Jean Vanier (Life’s Great Questions)
Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.--Alan Alda
Listening is essential in writing and it takes a lot of practice. It's not just listening with the ear, but it's that inner sort of listening. It's like listening to yourself think when you're driving long distances through the night, or listening to yourself play an instrument.--Sam Shepard
A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.--Agnes Repplier ("The Luxury of Conversation" in Compromises)
The most important thing you can do in a relationship is sit down and talk to each other, not with the TV on, or at the cinema, or over a meal, but just you and the other person where you can truly be heard and truly listen to each other.--Steven Aitchison (100 Ways to Develop Your Mind: The Psychology of the Mind and How to Develop Your Mind to Change Your Life
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.--Stephen R. Covey
No one listens willingly to someone who speaks to them from a position of self-righteousness and judgment. Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus reserves his harshest words for those who ignore their own weakness in order to lord it over others.--Pope Frances (Pope Francis and our Call to Joy)
No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.--Mignon McLaughlin (The Second Neurotic's Notebook)
The only way to entertain most people is to listen to them.--Elbert Hubbard
Remember: when you talk you only repeat what you already know, but if you listen you may learn something.--Amish School Saying
Respect comes from understanding each other’s stories. But we shout over each other and forget to listen. If we listened, we would find that what the other person was saying is an echo of what we are saying ourselves.--—Muhtar Bakare
The root of not listening is knowing. If I already know the truth, why do I need to listen to you?--Adam Kahane (Solving Tough Problems)
Several times a day, stop and just listen. Open your hearing 360 degrees, as if your ears were giant radar dishes. Listen to the obvious sounds, and the subtle sounds—in your body, in the room, in the building, and outside. Listen as if you had just landed from a foreign planet and didn’t know what was making these sounds. See if you can hear all sounds as music being played just for you. Even in what is called silence there is sound. To hear such subtle sound, the mind must be very quiet.--Jan Chozen Bays (How to Train a Wild Elephant and Other Adventures in Mindfulness)
Sometimes we have a confused notion that listening means agreement. It doesn’t. Whether we agree or don’t is a separate matter; we need to hear what someone has to say without confusing it with whether we see things the same way.--Diane Musho Hamilton (Everything Is Workable: A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution)
There’s a difference between listening passively and listening aggressively. To listen with your heart, you have to listen actively.–John Maxwell
Though the journey through conflict may seem perilous, we each have available to us a power to ease our way. This power quells anger, builds bridges of understanding, and wins us a hearing with even the most stubborn person. It is freely accessible to us and requires only that we let go of the need to be right (although some might find this a steep price). This greatly underused power is that of listening.--Gary Harper (The Joy of Conflict Resolution)
To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.--Terry Tempest Williams
To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.--Mark Nepo (The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life)
To listen well is as powerful a means to influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversations.--Chinese proverb
We hear one another into being.--Nelle Morton
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.--Ernest Hemingway
When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know; but when you listen, you may learn something new.--Dalai Lama
Whether you succeed or not, people will talk about you. Forget about what they say and listen to what your heart believes in.--Kevin Keenoo
With the gift of listening comes the gift of healing.--Catherine de Hueck Doherty (Poustinia)
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.-- Doug Larson
You seldom listen to me, and when you do you don't hear, and when you do hear you hear wrong, and even when you hear right you change it so fast that it's never the same.--Marjorie Kellogg (Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon)