Quotes About Communication

told me his heart was so full he could say no more to me.

secrets should never be opened without evident utility. It could be of no manner of use to me or her to communicate

I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.

husband; and so it may be supposed at first sight what a kind of life I led with him. However, I did as well as I could, and held my tongue, which was the only victory I gained over him; for when he would talk after his own empty rattling way with me, and I would not answer, or enter into discourse with him on the point he was upon, he would rise up in the greatest passion imaginable, and go away, which was the cheapest way I had to be delivered.

We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing.

This harkens back to Freud's famous question, "What does woman want?" As Epstein answers, "She wants a partner who cares what she wants.

Indeed, laughter may be the shortest distance between two brains, an unstoppable infectious spread that builds an instant social bond.

The most powerful form of nondefensive listening, of course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind what is being said.

We're being judged by a new yardstick: not just by how smart we are, or by our training and expertise, but also by how well we handle ourselves and each other.

But amid the din and distraction of work life, poor listening has become epidemic.

In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation—all signifying a lack of attention.

Not that leaders need to be overly "nice"; the emotional art of leadership includes pressing the reality of work demands without unduly upsetting people.

The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erving Goffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an "away," a gesture that tells another person "I'm not interested" in what's going on here and now.

Ordinarily, small children learn much about emotions by looking at the other person's eyes, while those with autism avoid the eyes and so fail to get those lessons.

It demoralizes people just to hear that they are doing "something" wrong without knowing what the specifics are so they can change.

In Japan, I learned the hard way that the moment of exchanging business cards signals an important ritual. We Americans are prone to casually pocketing the card without looking, which there indicates disrespect. I was told you should take the card carefully, hold it in both hands, and study it for a while before putting it away in a special case

Un estudiante universitario observa la soledad y el aislamiento que acompañan al hecho de vivir en un mundo virtual de tuits, actualizaciones de perfil y "subir fotos de la cena".

Cualquiera puede enfadarse, eso es algo muy sencillo. Pero enfadarse con la persona adecuada, en el grado exacto, en el momento oportuno, con el propósito justo y del modo correcto, eso, ciertamente, no resulta tan sencillo. Aristóteles, Ética a Nicómaco.

We catch feelings from one another as though they were some kind of social virus.

An artful critique focuses on what a person has done and can do rather than reading a mark of character into a job poorly done. As Larson observes, "A character attack—calling someone stupid or incompetent—misses the point. You immediately put him on the defensive, so that he's no longer receptive to what you have to tell him about how to do things better.

What typically escalates to conflict begins, as Vargo puts it, with "not communicating, making assumptions, and jumping to conclusions, sending a 'hard' message in ways that make it tough for people to hear what you're saying." Students

Teamwork, open lines of communication, cooperation, listening, and speaking one's mind—rudiments of social intelligence

And one of the paradoxes is that leaders, the higher they go, the less vertical feedback they get on how they're actually doing, because people are afraid to tell them. So leaders can go off in a direction thinking they're doing fine, not realizing they're not

Television, as the poet T. S. Eliot warned in 1963, when the then-new medium was spreading into homes, "permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.