Listening Quotes

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The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying.

- Sydney J. Harris

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

- Leo Buscaglia

Leadership is about creating, day by day, a domain in which we and those around us continually deepen our understanding of reality and are able to participate in shaping the future. This, then, is the deeper territory of leadership -- collectively "listening to what is wanting to emerge in the world, and then having the courage to do what is required."

- Joseph Jaworski

Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.

- David Augsburger

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely -- the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears -- when you give your whole attention to it.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Indeed -- judicious, consistent parenting is a dream of mine. No judgments, learning space and listening carefully are my goals.

- Emma Thompson

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.

- Alice Miller

You can practice deep listening in order to relieve the suffering in us, and in the other person. That kind of listening is described as compassionate listening. You listen only for the purpose of relieving suffering in the other person.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

- Robert Frost

We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.

- Tara Brach

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

- Ernest Hemingway

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice -- a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.

- Wendy Kaminer

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 Miller

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Children don't need much advice but they really do need to be listened to and not just with half an ear.

- Emma Thompson

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

- Edith Wharton

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

- Simone Weil

If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate, we hardly listen at all to what is being said.... One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of silence, in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quite; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.

- John Marshall

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Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

- Parker J. Palmer

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

- Karl Menninger

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

- M. Scott Peck

Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.

- Margaret J. Wheatley

To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

- Mark Nepo