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.
Interpretation
Listening fosters connection and growth in relationships.
In this quote, Karl A. Menninger emphasizes the profound impact of listening on interpersonal relationships. He suggests that those who take the time to truly listen to our thoughts and feelings create a magnetic bond with us, encouraging our personal development and expansion as individuals. Effective listening is not just about hearing words but engaging with the emotions and ideas behind them, which strengthens friendships and enhances our sense of self.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a team building workshop to highlight the importance of active listening.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
What's done to children, they will do to society.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
Friendship, "the wine of life," should, like a well-stocked cellar, be continually renewed.
Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.
Thus people--so it seems to me-- Become good friends from sheer ennui.
The reason for my starting a diary is that I have no real friend.
Since we don't know where we're going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there.
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