Quotes About Listening

never assume that you know what's best for anyone.

When you live from the perspective of being able to say, "I don't know for certain, but I'm willing to listen," you become a person whom others identify with.

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently—possibly almost invariably—analytical and impersonal test will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.

I bring you a warning—every one of you listening to my voice. Tell the world, tell this to everybody wherever they are: watch the skies, everywhere, keep looking—keep watching the skies!

There's no sense in doing a lot of barking if you don't really have anything to say.

Marcie, hai una macchina per cucire! Non è mia capo… È di mia madre. Perché non mi fai un costume da pattinaggio, Marcie? Io non so cucire, capo… Ecco! Puoi farmi un costume rosso con tanti lustrini! Non sei una che ascolta, vero, capo?

Most people enter a library and don't hear a thing. Eerie silence. I stand between the shelves and hear ten thousand conversations occurring all at once. Each ushering an invitation. The noise is raucous.

Child, you listen to me, and you look me straight in the eyes when I'm talking to you. I may be just old hired help, and a country woman to boot, but I'm a human. And you know what? God thought of me. He actually took the time to dream me up. I may not be much to look at, but what you see first started in the mind of God, so don't stand there and ignore me like I don't exist. You remember that." Miss

It was often what Charlie didn't say that spoke the loudest.

In my experience, it's those words on the tip of the tongue that we most need to hear. They are the key. The thing that's missing. But you can't pull them out. They have to be offered. Freely. And they won't be offered until the owner trusts you with them. And to do that means they've got to break through a world of hurt and pain just to get them out of their mouth.

I do know this: most people, myself included, are at their most vulnerable in a journal. They pour it all out. Sometimes a journal is the only ear that will listen, or at least the only one that you want to talk to.

If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.

communication simply requires

The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them." —LIFE TOGETHER

A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed; it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.

I like the silence between us, The quiet–that holy state even the rain Knows about. Listen to her begin to fall, As if with eyes closed, Muting each drop in her wild-beating heart. — Charles Simic, closing lines to "This Morning," A Wedding in Hell (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994)

God's voice is still and quiet and easily buried under an avalanche of clamour.

To have God speak to the heart is a majestic experience, an experience that people may miss if they monopolize the conversation and never pause to hear God's responses.

Genuine communication in the family is one of the hardest things in the world to learn

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights, and governments need to learn from that, listen to the movement and respond.

These months drive us to listen within.

In all the years she'd been talking to houses, the houses had never talked back.