Quotes About Listening

Sometimes it is easier to hear the cries of poor people who are far away than it is to hear the cries of our brothers and sisters in our own community. There is nothing very splendid in responding to the cry of the person who is with us day after day and who gets on our nerves. Perhaps too we can only respond to the cries of others when we have recognized and accepted the cry of our own pain.

From doing to listening in the end, the most important thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but to enter into relationship with them, to be with them and help them find confidence in themselves and discover their own gifts. . . . The promise of Jesus is to help us discover that the poor are a source of life and not just objects of our charity.

Écouter, c'est d'abord une attitude. C'est chercher à comprendre l'autre avec ses souffrances, ses désirs et son espérance, sans le juger ni le condamner. Écouter, c'est mettre l'autre en valeur pour lui donner vie et l'aider à avoir confiance en lui...Quand je suis trop centré sur mes projets, quand j'ai besoin de me prouver, j'ai davantage du mal à écouter

Growth will come as we come closer to people who are different from us and as we learn to welcome and listen even to those who trigger off our pain.

In a relationship of communion, you are you and I am I; I have my identity and you have yours. I must be myself and you must be yourself. We are called to grow together, each one becoming more fully himself or herself. Communion, in fact, gives the freedom to grow. It is not possessiveness. It entails a deep listening to others, helping them to become more fully themselves.

Drummond appreciated his guest's initial silence, his respect for the ancient, sacred act of imbibing. Drink first, talk later.

n'ai obéi qu'à une exigence, d'ailleurs non formulée, celle de donner à entendre ma voix, et cela, si je puis dire, à mes propres oreilles : ma voix, comme si je craignais, après tant d'années consacrées à écouter les voix des autres, de perdre la mienne

A la fin du dîner, elle l'avait si religieusement écouté qu'il la trouvait intelligente.

Luca likes to listen to the foreign sounds, the peaks and rolls of the words he doesn't understand. He likes the way voices sound the same in every language, the way, if you train your ear to listen just outside the words, to only the shifting inflections, you can attach your own meaning to the sounds.

Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

Mais puisque je ne peux pas m'arracher à l'objectivité qui m'écrase, ni à la subjectivité qui m'exile, puisqu'il ne m'est pas possible de m'élever jusqu'à l'être, ni de tomber dans le néant, il faut que j'écoute. Il faut que je regarde autour de moi plus que jamais… Le monde… Mon semblable… Mon frère… »

She knew that hearing bad things about yourself is one of the punishments for eavesdropping.

Iantha was a calm mother who didn't believe in adding to the chaos of woe....It was one of Iantha's many skills that she could listen to lots of people speaking at the same time and still get hold of the important parts." (Chapter 2)

we had long silences together over the line. I liked those moments. With my ear close to the receiver, I'd try to hear her breath, her breathing. When she broke the silence, her voice became more important.

Scripture consists of what has been heard, not what has been said.

We still do not know what Yeshua really said. We know only what a number of hearers and witnesses have heard. Scripture consists of what has been heard, not what has been said.

The Internet is the aggregate of human derpitude. Listening to the Internet without being confident you've found a well-curated garden relative to the area of concern is a bad idea.

Two monologues do not make a dialogue.

When things get personal, we need to resist the natural male instinct to run for cover, man the defenses, or--worst of all--reach for the big guns. Much better to set aside our natural defensiveness and focus on listening well even though we feel under attack. Because we're probably not.

Anything can become music if listened to long enough

Try showing up at your doctor's office and giving her your "requirements." Tell her the prescriptions you'd like written and the operations you'd like scheduled. If she's nice, she'll smile and say, "That's interesting; tell me where it hurts.

Try to make your working relationships much more like a good doctor-patient relationship, and much less like a waiter-diner's.

She looked at me like I was stupid and said to me one last time with an air of finality, "They're requirements." It was at that moment that I learned that the word requirements actually means shut up. For a great many people, that's exactly what requirements do. They stop conversations about people and the problems we're solving. The truth is, if you build a fraction of what's required you can still make people very happy.