Listening Quotes

What advantage has the person who will not listen over the one who cannot hear?

~ Joyce Rachelle

Our Victrola stood in the diningroom. I was allowed to climb onto the seat of a diningroom chair to wind it, start the record turning, and set the needle playing. In a second I'd jumped to the floor, to spin or march around the room as the music called for - now there were all the other records I could play too. I skinned back onto the chair just in time to lift the needle at the end, stop the record and turn it over, then change the needle. Winding up, dancing, being cocked to start and stop the record, was of course, all in one the act of listening. Movement must be at the very heart of listening.

~ Eudora Welty

Listening is two part, attention and thinking. The latter is what a lot of us don't do

~ Hadi Farnoud

When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say.

~ Maggie Kuhn

Something about you makes me feel like I can tell you things like that. You’re so still. It’s like, you’ll just hear it.” He smiled wryly. “I can’t even hear what I’m thinking most of the time,” he said, his brow wrinkling. “My brain’s noisy.

~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

A few years ago, a taxi driver told me about a club & a dog. A waiter spoke to me about ladders today. Life is full of lessons for those who listen.

~ Indeewara Jayawardane

Listening isn't just about being quiet. It's about listening to what is said, what is unsaid, and what is meant with your eyes, ears and heart.

~ Drishti Bablani

So even though Grandpa's life has closed its final chapter, the story that he embodied continues each time we take a handful of dirt to check moisture levels or turn our head at the sound of the wind shifting directions before a storm. It lives on as we give thanks for the abundance that we have, whatever it looks like. It lives on in every decision we make that puts someone else first.

~ Heidi Barr

A good listener is a witness, not a judge of your experience.

~ Michael P Nichols

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

~ Jon Stewart

Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide from others so as not to vex them. It shows what a couple can be for each other, how they can listen to each other. People who only want to listen to themselves will hate tango.

~ Nina George

The cliché is true: People don't care what we know until they know we care.

~ Rick Warren

When anyone tells me I can’t do anything, I’m just not listening any more.

~ Florence Griffith Joyner

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.

~ Shaikh Ashraf

When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it’s not about voice, it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.

~ Kathleen Jamie

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.

~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Listen should be on 60-70% and talking or speaking on from 40 up to 30%.

~ Deyth Banger

Don’t ask a yes or no question unless the person being asked can say no without hesitation.

~ Clifford Cohen

When people speak, listen carefully and pay particular attention to what they are not saying.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.

~ Doug Larson

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

~ Harper Lee

Good listeners, like precious gems, are to be treasured.

~ Walter Anderson

If speaking is silver, then listening is gold.

~ Turkish Proverbs

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.

~ Joyce Brothers

Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you. Listen in such a way that others love to speak to you.

~ Anonymous

True wisdom listens more, talks less, and can get along with all types of people.

~ Kiana Tom

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

~ Alan Alda

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

~ Bernard Baruch

There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art of conversation lies in listening.

~ Malcom Forbes

The best listener is the one who really cares about the other person.

~ Kevin Stirtz

Learning to listen relationally, listen with cool heads and clear boundaries, listen with the quietness of the heart and the gentleness of the body, means having a self so developed it can afford to yield.

~ Terrence Real

Oscar’s hobby was saving people. He used to save people all the time, and fix things that were broken and catch people when they were falling. It wasn’t a skill you’d immediately know about or notice. Stevie said that Oscar had a gift and the gift was that he could smell things you wouldn’t imagine would smell of anything- things like sadness and desperation. Things like far and hopelessness.He never made a big deal about it, but he was quiet and confident – and when you believe in own abilities, you are much more likely to be always ready to act on them, which Oscar always was. Whenever I asked him about it, he claimed that his were not exceptional or extraordinary abilities in the slightest. Everyone, he said, is able to tell when someone is in need of help, but few people really take the time to listen to their instincts, and that, he said, was the only difference between him and a lot of other of people.

~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Listening has certainly become a scarce skill, therefore we need ways to enhance this skill especially for the next generation.

~ Gugu Mona

People usually have to be dragged kicking and screaming into what’s good for them.

~ Clifford Cohen

People are looking for someone to listen to them. Someone willing to grant them time, to listen to their dramas and difficulties. This is what I call the “apostolate of the ear,” and it is important. Very important. I feel compelled to say to confessors: talk, listen with patience, and above all tell people that God loves them.

~ Pope Francis

Listening isn't just about being quiet.It's about listening to -What is Said,What is Unsaid,and What is meantWith your Eyes, Ears and Heart

~ Wordions

One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew

~ Rick Perlstein

She was as bored as her brother would have been, and had not his gift of listening beneath words.

~ E.m. Forster

There was something in the way he posed a question and followed it up with a generous pause, I think, that drew me out. I had never noticed all the pauses that were missing from most people's conversations.

~ Suzanne Rindell