Best 1940 quotes in «listening quotes» category

even the silence, if you listened, meant something.

Evere since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It wasn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the poem or the story itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers - to read as listeners - and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don;t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

Everything in my environment is offering me feedback, if I will only listen.

Everyone likes to reminisce, but not one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

Everything would have been for nothing just because I simply didn’t listen.

Finding happiness by delivering it.

Focus your attention on the quality of your words, and not the quantity, because few sensible talks attracts millions of listeners more than a thousand gibberish.

Every experienced pastor knows that what the penitent heart says about itself is much more consequential than well-made truthful sentences that shout from the outside of the inner voice of conscience. No element of confession is more crucial than the discipline of listening. The attentive listener is a chosen agent of divine reconciliation. When the moment for keen listening is offered, take it as an inestimable gift.

For a woman's words to wound would require a man to listen first!

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.

From listening and silence can be learn a lot of, but these skills to be learn that's the hard and complicated work...

For so long, I hadn't really heard Margo - I'd seen her screaming and thought her laughing - that now I figured it was my job. To try, even at this great remove, to hear the opera of her.

Getting in touch with the lovelessness within and letting that lovelessness speak its pain is one way to begin again on love's journey. In relationships, whether heterosexual or homosexual, the partner who is hurting often finds that their mate is unwilling to 'hear' the pain. Women often tell me that they feel emotionally beaten down when their partners refuse to listen or talk. When women communicate from a place of pain, it is often characterized as 'nagging.' Sometimes women hear repeatedly that their partners are 'sick of listening to this shit.' Both cases undermine self-esteem. Those of us who were wounded in childhood often were shamed and humiliated when we expressed hurt. It is emotionally devastating when the partners we have chosen will not listen. Usually, partners who are unable to respond compassionately when hearing us speak our pain, whether they understand it or not, are unable to listen because that expressed hurt triggers their own feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. Many men never want to feel helpless or vulnerable. They will, at times, choose to silence a partner with violence rather than witness emotional vulnerability. When a couple can identify this dynamic, they can work on the issue of caring, listening to each other's pain by engaging in short conversations at appropriate times (i.e., it's useless to try and speak your pain to someone who is bone weary, irritable, reoccupied, etc.). Setting a time when both individuals come together to engage in compassionate listening enhances communication and connection. When we are committed to doing the work of love we listen even when it hurts.

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability - a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions.

Free speech doesn't solve political conflicts. It creates them. Solving them requires more advanced tools like trust, humility, dialogue, listening.

Good advice is not often served in our favorite flavor.

Good listening places us on an edifice of learning complex human behavior.

Good students pay attention to their teachers; great students teach themselves.

Great men speak to us only so far as we have ears and souls to hear them; only so far as we have in us the roots, at least, of that which flowers out in them.

God's Word makes it very clear that the state of our hearts determines the quality of our "listening ears.

...he asked, "Where are you today, right now?" Eagerly, I started talking about myself. However, I noticed that I was still being sidetracked from getting answers to my questions. Still, I told him about my distant and recent past and about my inexplicable depressions. He listened patiently and intently, as if he had all the time in the world, until I finished several hours later. "Very well," he said. "But you still have not answered my question about where you are." "Yes I did, remember? I told you how I got to where I am today: by hard work." "Where are you?" "What do you mean, where am I?" "Where Are you?" he repeated softly. "I'm here." "Where is here?" "In this office, in this gas station!" I was getting impatient with this game. "Where is this gas station?" "In Berkeley?" "Where is Berkeley?" "In California?" "Where is California?" "In the United States?" "On a landmass, one of the continents in the Western Hemisphere. Socrates, I..." "Where are the continents? I sighed. "On the earth. Are we done yet?" "Where is the earth?" "In the solar system, third planet from the sun. The sun is a small star in the Milky Way galaxy, all right?" "Where is the Milky Way?" "Oh, brother, " I sighed impatiently, rolling my eyes. "In the universe." I sat back and crossed my arms with finality. "And where," Socrates smiled, "is the universe?" "The universe is well, there are theories about how it's shaped..." "That's not what I asked. Where is it?" "I don't know - how can I answer that?" "That is the point. You cannot answer it, and you never will. There is no knowing about it. You are ignorant of where the universe is, and thus, where you are. In fact, you have no knowledge of where anything is or of What anything is or how is came to be. Life is a mystery. "My ignorance is based on this understanding. Your understanding is based on ignorance. This is why I am a humorous fool, and you are a serious jackass.

Having someone who listens is a great gift, but to be truly heard is a treasure.

[Hearing] was distinct from listening, which could only be achieved when hearing was combined with giving a shit.

He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.

He knew most men only heard what they wanted to hear, and he had no desire to be like most men.

He is deaf, and keen to accept, any economical operation, that will correct his situation. He visited the doctor best, and started talking on subject, like the after-effects, and if any threats. The doctor medically checked, and asked him what he expects? He expressed, he wants to be addressed- in words, and not in signs. And how keen he is, to have his ears listening. He wants to listen the echo of, sun-set over that crimson dawn. He is keen to know, the sound of, a blooming rose. He wants to know what it sounds like, when a seedling grows. But Doctor- if you say: You are incapable, then I better get away, for then there is- nothing worth to be heard, in your seemingly wordy world.

He listened the way a cactus drinks rain—every word a precious drop in a world frugal with wonder.

He listens when I talk.

He listened like a cactus drinks the rain.

Go Slow to Go Fast in Growing a Stronger Bond With Others: When you see someone's interest rise in the conversation, you have a glimpse of the hook that can best connect you together. Ask follow-up questions, directly related to what that person just said. If you do just this much, recent research shows you are among the five percent of Americans in conversation. In so doing, you accomplish two things. You've increased their openness and warmth toward you, because you've demonstrated you care. And you've had a closer look at the hook that most matters to them in the conversation. Now you can speak to their hottest interest, in a way that can serve you both.

He kept telling and I kept repeating “I Know” sometimes people doesn’t need answers, they just need you to hear them what they say, make them that they are heard, Vijay was like that, he doesn’t need any one sympathizing to him, he just needed people to listen to him.

He who listens learns more than he who speaks.

He who does not want to understand the Other has no right to say that what the Other does or says makes no sense.

He who listens with his mind knows; he who listens with his heart understands.

His practice was to listen noncommittally with half his mind, while he allowed the other half to lose itself in utterly unrelated , often deeply lonely musings. From the speaker's perspective it was like sticking a lance into something again and again with no result...

Hey. You heard what Rock said. I know how you feel. We can help you shoulder this" "Do you really?" Rlain said. "Do you actually know how I feel, Kaladin Stormblessed? Or is that simply a thing that men say?" "I guess it's a thing men say," Kaladin admitted, then pulled over an upside-down bucket for himself. "Can you tell me how it feels?

His head was on one side, listening to me, and that was such sweeness to me, that he listened intently. No one, it seemed, has ever listened like he does.

Her father had learned only one thing in prison. Not humility, nor patience, nor understanding...Marshall Kofer had learned to listen, at least to his daughter".

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. it's like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street.

How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?

Horace Greeley's conversation inevitably becomes a speech.

I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there.

How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires. And is there any other form of listening? Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby? Listening has importance only when on is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?

I believe my mother was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she'd get one-syllable answers.

I came to the conclusion that, even in life, unless I’m responding with my whole self—unless, in fact, I’m willing to be changed by you—I’m probably not really listening. But if I do listen—openly, naïvely, and innocently—there’s a chance, possibly the only chance, that a true dialogue and real communication will take place between us.

I always listen to everything you say. You have very authoritative hair.

I always listen to what I can leave out.

I could feel something that I hadn’t felt for a long time. Something quiet and difficult to spot, but it was the feeling that you get when someone is listening to you. Really listening carefully. And it makes you want to tell things exactly the right way. It makes you want to take your time and explain, and get it right.

I'd much rather hear someone's unique interpretation of their own experience. Those who negate or override someone else's experience in order to one-up them or to show off their own knowledge or perceived abilities are in truth showing off their lack of listening skills and wisdom.