Listening Quotes

Listen to others very carefully. Shut your inner noise and focus on verbal and non verbal cues.

~ Abhishek Ratna

Bloom with hope! Breathe in with hope in your soul. Thrive on with endurance in your heart. Move on with a productive mind. Listen carefully to the soft message of whispering hope.

~ Angelica Hopes

In order to understand the impact you can have on another's life by listening you need to first be intimate with the experience of being heard.

~ Madelaine Standing

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.

~ Kare Anderson

R.E.A.L. conversation: Recognize judgments. Express thoughts neutrally. Ask questions. Listen for verbal & non-verbal messages.

~ John Stoker

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply.

~ Stephen R. Covey

This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.

~ Sarah Dessen

We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.

~ Zeno Of Citium

Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.

~ Bernard M. Baruch

I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older

~ Lauren Oliver

We have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionally.

~ Susan Cain

Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.

~ Madeleine L'engle

You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.

~ M. Scott Peck

An appreciative listener is always stimulating.

~ Agatha Christie

When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.

~ Diogenes Laërtius

When we fear what other people think about us, we are frequently more focused on 'being interesting' and less focused on 'taking an interest.' That's why many people talk a great deal when they are anxious and why many people never feel heard. If both people and conversation are trying to be interesting, there is no one left to genuinely listen.

~ John Yokoyama

You may see all that is around youBut you may feel nothing at all.So try and close your eyes so tightAnd listen to the night time fall.

~ Stephen Cosgrove

The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener— a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.

~ Dale Carnegie

I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.

~ Anthony Kiedis

I never miss a good chance to shut up

~ James Patterson

Maybe you’re so good at listening that you have no idea when to speak.” ~Braeden

~ S.m. Boyce

People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.

~ Alice Duer Miller

I care about who you are, who you have been, who you want to be. I open myself to you to listen and learn about you. I cherish you, not just my fantasy of who you are, not just who I need you to be, but who you really are...

~ Betty Berzon

There's more than one way to tell each other things, and there's more than one way to listen, too.

~ Katherine Hannigan

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Do you wonder that I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances' secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations.How do you know? -- how can you guess all this, sir?I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing my thoughts in a diary.

~ Charlotte Brontë

You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you’re trying to listen to.

~ John Green

I can't afford to say yes to all my staff's desires, but one thing is certain – I can't afford the outrageous cost of not listening to their requests.

~ John Yokoyama

She was like some kind of Energizer Bunny nonstop bitch machine...She needed three more husbands, so we could all take shifts listening to her.

~ Victor Gischler

The activity of interpreting might be understood as listening for the 'song beneath the words.

~ Ronald A. Heifetz

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.

~ Garth Stein

Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.

~ Emily Post

Intrusive, thoughtless people! said K. as he turned back into the room. The supervisor may have agreed with him, at least K. thought that was what he saw from the corner of his eye. But it was just as possible that he had not even been listening as he had his hand pressed firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers.

~ Franz Kafka

And Edward was surprised to discover that he was listening. Before, when Abilene had talked to him, everything had seemed so boring, so pointless. But now, the stories Nellie told struck him as the most important thing in the world and he listened as if his life depended on what she said. (page 69)

~ Kate Dicamillo

They praised his modesty and did not listen to him, for listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134}

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Sue Woolfe

You must endeavor to seem interested in the conversations of others, you'll be surprised by what you might learn.

~ Ge Paulus

Sing your own song. There are always some earnest listeners.

~ Amit Ray