Quotes About Listening

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.

It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard. The words of the proud man impose silence on all others, so that he alone may be heard. The humble man speaks only in order to be spoken to.

I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.

For he who knows does not speak, He who speaks does not know" (12) And "The Wise Man gives instruction Without the use of speech." (13)

In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, will never become anything, and in the end, because have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.

For the monk searches not only his own heart: he plunges deep into the heart of that world of which he remains a part although he seems to have left it. In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.

He is heard only when we hope to hear Him, and if, thinking our hope to be fulfilled, we cease to speak, His silence ceases to be vivid and becomes dead, even though we recharge it with the echo of our own emotional noise.

Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard.

kind of prayer we here speak of as properly "monastic" (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of "the heart.

We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen.

My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.

Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.

She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her.

Se había convertido en toda una experta, pensó, en escuchar como si no escuchara, en penetrar fugazmente en las vidas de las personas que hablaban a su alrededor.

Listening is love in action.

foster a teacher's habit of paying close attention to what students say, whether they speak through words or actions.

Listen to. To hear with thoughtful attention. To hold something close, to attend to it, to be astonished by it, to devote your life to its mysteries, to name it precisely, to wonder how it comes to be. To stay awake to it. To move closer to the wild and twittering night. To let it cover you and keep you safe. To me, listening is starting to sound a lot like love.

When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it's not about voice, it's about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don't just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.

I grew to appreciate the company of people who listen to the world. They don't feel the need to talk all the while. They were alert to bird-cries, waves sucking on rocks, a rope frittering against a mast.

Your eyes are everything. (Maybe why some people give up on talking.)

listen just as Jesus listened. With love and understanding. And even, if need be, with forgiveness:' Beth didn't want to tell him, but she was so weary of bearing her secret alone. Even if she

Anyone who listens to the world, anyone who seeks the sacred in the ordinary events of life, has "problems about how to believe.

Listening to all words--the silent words of nature, the words of friends and enemies, and the words of scripture--can become an exercise in human yearning and divine response, flowing in and out of one's life like a river current.