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.
When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it's because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn't say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye.
What's most important in a friendship? Tolerance and loyalty.
I dedicate the merit of the occasion to all beings. This gesture of universal friendship has been likened to a drop of fresh spring water. If we put it on a rock in the sunshine, it will soon evaporate. If we put it in the ocean, however, it will never be lost. Thus the wish is made that we not keep the teachings to ourselves but to use them to benefit others.
Loyalty is what we seek in friendship.
Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber; it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world! – and unfortunately' (speaking low and tremulously) 'there are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late.
Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ."
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