Quotes About Listening

I wonder what would happen if you gave up your need to be right?

the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.

What needs to be counted on to have a voice? Courage. Anger. Love. Something to say; someone to speak to; someone to listen. I have talked to myself for years in the privacy of my journals.

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.

Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest.

I believe that spiritual resistance -- the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede, that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river the rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is the best retrieved in solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.

Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in a concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen home and the bird-worms are calmed into an ars poetica.

We are slowly returning to the hour of land where our human presence can take a side step and respect the integrity of the place itself - paying attention to its own historical and ecological character beyond our needs and desires. This kind of generosity of spirit requires an uncommon humility to listen to the land first.

Life is not so predictable. I am forced to listen more carefully. In the right and left worlds, the stories told are largely set, there much to defend at the expense of the other, rhetoric is charged with certitude; it's safer here, we are sure we are correct. We become missionaries for a position, yes, exactly, no doubt about it, practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

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

When we don't listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don't, others will abandon us. We've been raised to question what we know, to discount and discredit the authority of our gut. I want to know why. I regret whenever I abandon myself. But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here... I am growing beyond my own conditioning, breaking set with what was breaking me.

I fear silence because it leads me to myself, a self I may not wish to confront. It asks that I listen. And in listening, I am taken to an unknown place. Silence leaves me alone in a place of feeling. It is not necessarily a place of comfort.

We are all having to move beyond what is comfortable. Patience is stretched. Personalities get in the way. Egos provide points of obstruction. It is never easy. We are learning to listen. We are learning to forgive. We are learning to go forward, believing what binds us together as a community is stronger than individual bickering points. And we are having a great time.

I received my first tutorial on voice. 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.

Nadine did a lot of listening. It was the men who seemed to do all the talking.

All the wonders of life are already here. They're calling you. If you can listen to them, you will be able to stop running. What you need, what we all need, is silence. Stop the noise in your mind in order for the wondrous sounds of life to be heard. Then you can begin to live your life authentically and deeply.

So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person.

For our dialogue to be open, we need to open our hearts, set aside our prejudices, listen deeply, and represent truthfully what we know and understand.

You can't take the other person out of you. You can't take yourself out of others. The suffering still continues. So the question is not whether you will stay together or not; the question is whether you can focus on trying to understand each other using compassionate speech and deep listening, no matter what the outcome.

In a true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.

For dialogue to be fruitful, we need to live deeply our own tradition and, at the same time, listen deeply to others. Through the practice of deep looking and deep listening, we become free, able to see the beauty and values in our own and others' tradition.

when I try to impose my ideas on others and thereby refuse to allow them to think, I end up getting in the way more than I end up being helpful.

The most successful negotiators understand the other side's concerns and worries as much as their own. But who is more likely to be able to consider and understand the other side's positions so fully—the person who sees others as objects or the person who sees them as people?

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth