Listening Quotes

I think she's brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.

~ Lauren Destefano

Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you wrote, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck. Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You can take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are....If you can capture the way things are that's all the poetry you ever need.

~ Natalie Goldberg

People with power listen less carefully, and have difficulty taking into account what others already know.

~ Dean M. Schroeder

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds--the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking about books, for obsessing over pop culture, but mostly for laughing, talking, and simply being together. There was nothing one could say that the other would find too cruel or too kind. And on those rare occasions when they did tire of each other, they needed only go a day without talking before they yearned to reconnect.

~ Galt Niederhoffer

Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people's stories.

~ Randy Alcorn

Talking doesn't get your point across but listening does.

~ Debasish Mridha

Listen to your heart, it will guide you on the right path.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A person’s voice can have such a powerful experience on the listener, very different from looking at the words on the page.

~ Frank Beddor

If only parents would listen! If only they would let us talk instead of forever and eternally and continuously harping and preaching and nagging and correcting and yacking, yacking, yacking! But they won’t listen! They simply won’t or can’t or don’t want to listen, and we kids keep winding up back in the same old frustrating, lost, lonely corner with no one to relate to either verbally or physically.

~ Anonymous

My parents are great listenersWhich is why I never tell them anything

~ Sonya Sones

Influencing is just not about listening and speaking, it’s the game of interpretation.

~ Harrish Sairaman

When the voices of doubt start whispering, turn-up the volume of faith and listen to your heart.

~ Bryant Mcgill

We must be present enough and receptive enough to “hear” with our whole being beyond just the words that are being spoken.

~ Henry Kimsey-House

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.

~ Krista Tippett

Lincoln loved other people's jokes as much as his own.

~ Richard Brookhiser

Listening is a tough skill, but one who practice it becomes The Successful Leader!!!

~ Santosh Adbhut Kumar

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

~ Ernest Hemingway

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.

~ Brené Brown

If I had an ear 2 confide inI would cry among my treasured friendsBut who do u know that stops that longto help another carry onThe world moves fast and it would rather pass u bythan 2 stop and c what makes u cry

~ Tupac Shakur

Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

~ Leslie Jamison

He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

In addition to an open heart and open mind, I also brought (to the small group Bible study) an open mouth.

~ John Kasich

Listening out for the sound of [his parent's] return kept him suspended in a semi-permanent state of agitation just like an apparently sleeping cat whose ear radar never rests.

~ Jon Edgell

The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.

~ Germain G. Glidden

And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear.

~ Ray Bradbury

An argument in apologetics, when actually used in dialogue, is an extension of the arguer. The arguer's tone, sincerity, care, concern, listening, and respect matter as much as his or her logic - probably more. The world was won for Christ not by arguments but by sanctity: What you are speaks so loud, I can hardly hear what you say.

~ Peter Kreeft

A woman will feel emotionally secure when you can listen to her stories. Then she will learn to love you.

~ Tara Estacaan

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

~ Liu Cixin

top connecting with the world. Connect with yourself on your beach. Stop thinking. Stop analyzing. Start feeling. Start dreaming.

~ Kim Ha Campbell

Listen to your intuition and the quiet promptings of your heart.

~ Bryant Mcgill

He did it (listened) as the world's most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet.

~ Stephen King

If I’m surprised at where I’m at, it’s probably because I’m not listening to the reality that listening to the voices that I’ve listened to have put me here. So, maybe I should be less surprised and more disappointed.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ John Grisham

Our relations seemed poor to me, and I wasn't surprised that the US intelligence picture in the Horn of Africa was weak. Much of what I read consisted of recycled news headlines repackaged as intelligence. Real, valuable intelligence only came from real people, yet we hadn't done much to meet and work with the people.

~ Eric Greitens

Listening is among the most generous ways to give. When a loved one talks to us— whether their words appear to be deep or shallow— listen. For in some way, they are baring their souls.

~ Jan Karon

I thought of you when I read this quote from Come Rain or Come Shine (A Mitford Novel) by Jan Karon -Listening is among the most generous ways to give. When a loved one talks to us— whether their words appear to be deep or shallow— listen. For in some way, they are baring their souls.

~ Jan Karon

There’s no better way to serve and nourish the magnificence in another person than to simply listen to them openheartedly and without judgment.

~ Henry Kimsey-House

For most of my life I've been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me.

~ Steve Rasnic Tem

On why 300 years separates the first use of glass lenses in spectacles and their use in a telescope: “In many cases there are times when an invention is technologically possible – and in which it may indeed appear necessary, as the telescope may have – but without a market the idea will not sell, and in the absence of the technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will not survive.

~ James Burke

It is a tremendous gift to simply and truly listen to another.

~ Bryant Mcgill