One learns more from listening than speaking. And both the wind and the people who continue to live close to nature still have much to tell us which we cannot hear within university walls.
Interpretation
Listening is more valuable than speaking, as wisdom often comes from nature and experience outside formal education.
This quote emphasizes the importance of listening as a vital source of knowledge and understanding. Thor Heyerdahl suggests that valuable lessons can be learned from both nature and the people who are in tune with it, lessons that may elude those who confine their learning to academic environments. It implies that true education comes not just from institutions, but from experiencing and observing the world around us.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of active listening in communication.
Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? I guarantee nothing but a free trip to Peru and the South Sea islands and back, but you will find good use for your technical abilities on the voyage. Reply at once.' Next day the following telegram arrived from Torstein: COMING. TORSTEIN.
Land! An island! We devoured it greedily with our eyes and woke the others, who tumbled out drowsily and stared in all directions as if they thought our bow was about to run on to a beach. Screaming seabirds formed a bridge across the sky in the direction of the distant island, which stood out sharper against the horizon as the red background widened and turned gold with the approach of the sun and the full daylight.
In my experience, it is rarer to find a really happy person in a circle of millionaires than among vagabonds.
People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.
You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.
A man's mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.
Expect much from yourself and little from others and you will avoid incurring resentments
The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.
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