Quotes About Listening

Maybe if you listen to Radio 4 enough from an early age, you just get educated subliminally

Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because while each note remains the same, I used to hear them differently. It used to sound better.

If we Americans are to learn from our mistakes, from the flailing, ineffective way we, as a nation, conducted the war on terror after the attacks of 9/11, and from the way we have failed to make our case to the great moderate mass of peace-loving people at the heart of the Muslim world, we need to listen to Greg Mortenson. I did, and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

I am saying that Christians have many resources for listening to God's voice and discerning God's will. But given human limits—even as humans with Jesus in front of us, the Bible open before us, and the Spirit within us—I am rejecting any inerrant path to infallible doctrine.

They will want answers. Then they'll want silence.

The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.

The only necessary key to understanding the Bible is to approach it with a humble and contrite heart softened by the Holy Spirit, ready to listen to what God says, and just as ready to obey him. The

We are disclosing animals, wired for unburdening. It's what we do as a species. When I am being told, I listen, mindful of the honor, remembering all the while that the shore would be mistaken to believe that the waves lap up against him because he is so beautiful.

We hear with our ears; we listen with our intution and our heart.

The ability to hear someone is really about trust, not simply about communication. A trust issue always lurks beneath a communication difficulty.

No one responds or even looks at him. It's as if he didn't say it. If an accountant says words in a kitchen and no one listens, did he make a sound?

I know there is no point in haranguing him because he will just shut down, but I want to cover every angle.

Though what I have in mind', he said, 'is something far different. I thought if we listened to the music you could write down whatever you felt.' He turned on the gramophone.

If America wants to retain its position as a global power, its president must listen to the people and show strong leadership at this turning point in human history.

When we listen to one another, we heal and learn. When we condemn and vilify one another, at best we lose the ability to grow; at worst, people get hurt.

As Jack listened at the top of the stairs, a tear welled in his eye, and rolled very slowly down his cheek. 8

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world, a presence that seems to demand a moving internal symmetry in the one breathing and listening equal to its own breathing, listening elemental powers.

How do you casually listen to something that makes the walls of your heart crumble?

What came next wasn't exactly silence, because although it was quiet, a thousand things were being said. I hated that part about an unhappy household--that feeling of being perched and listening, the way an animal must feel at night in the dark, assessing danger.

Sometimes silence is not an indicator of not caring, but a way to give time and space to the one who's hurting. Only judge when time passes ad the void widens such that the chasm cannot be bridged.

Listen to yourself and you are heard.

Listen to your body. The quality of your communication matters.

Listening with the focus of actually understanding what the other person is trying to communicate is priceless, a talent that everyone possesses but not something that is practiced enough.