Quotes About Listening

If you're going to counsel people - and that's all my ministry is, it's a counseling ministry more than anything else - people have to believe that they can trust you and that they can listen to you, that you're going to try to help them and not just politically try to convert them to your views.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

When a man interrupts a woman in mid-sentence, it reveals much about him. First, it shows he hasn't been listening to what she is saying, and secondly, it indicates that he doesn't want to listen to what she will say. Her views are not important.

I often go into the lions' den and engage with those I know oppose my views, because I want to understand what other people think.

I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself.

If I'm on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they're finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop.

To play vinyl onstage is not my thing. For me, vinyl is for home listening.

Sure, we all like listening to music on vinyl, but that doesn't mean streaming music on Spotify is bad.

I believe in doing vinyl. As long as vinyl can still be made into a high-quality standard, I'm going to still make all my records as a side A and a side B because that's how I grew up listening to music.

I play vinyl and CDs. Playing vinyl is the best sound quality you can get playing music loudly, so that's the main reason I do that.

My dad is a guitar player with huge vinyl record collection. I loved listening to his albums, especially Cream and The Yardbirds.

The main difference between listening to music on a computer and listening to music on vinyl or disc is not sound quality or even portability; it's that when you listen to music on a computer, you listen to music on the same instrument you use to acquire it.

One thing I always loved about vinyl was the length of a side, around 20 or 22 minutes. That's the perfect length of an attention span for listening time, you know? You could listen and give it all your attention. Put on something that's 70 minutes, and nobody's sticking around past the first 20 or 30 minutes.

I was very interested in the relationship between the man who speaks and the woman who listens. I was drawn to the idea that the relationship between a man and a woman can be something like a war itself, very cruel and violent.

My mum especially listens to music in a way that is incredibly feelings-based. There's virtually no snobbery about what sounds are in it, she just wants to hear a song and that is quite refreshing.

Being intellectually hospitable is a virtue that I bring into the interview space.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

I know Jim Cornette says the reason that I'm successful now is because I changed my attitude, and I must be listening to what people tell me now, and I used to not listen to him. But the thing is, I used to not listen to him or question his methods because I didn't agree with him, and I didn't share his vision.

And if you can tolerate these deeper feelings long enough to understand them and listen to what they're telling you, you'll not only manage your anger in more productive ways, you also won't be so angry all the time.

One woman said to her husband, "You know what three words are even more romantic to me than 'I love you'?" "You look beautiful?" he tried. "No," his wife said. "I understand you.")

and listen so attentively to the details of your day that, like your personal biographer, he'll remember more about your life than you will.

In the early sessions, it's always more important for patients to feel heard and understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make any changes.

Years later, when I've done thousands of first sessions, and information-gathering has become second nature, I'll use a different barometer to judge how it went: Did the patient feel understood?

It takes a while to hear a person's story and for that person to tell it, and like most stories—including mine—it bounces all over the place before you know what the plot really is.