Quotes on Listening

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering.

If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate among us of all respect for humanity.

Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.

And he goes through life, his mouth open, and his mind closed.

It is the language of nature to which one has to listen.

The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.

No more words. Hear only the voice within.

We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Records were vitally important to the development of music and of all music cultures. With that being pushed by the wayside, I can't see an iPod uniting us. In fact it separates us, the streets are full of people bumping into lamp posts, listening to their own little universe, and there's no sharing in that.

An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature.

Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision.

If we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear.

I am here and you will know that I am the best and will hear me. The color of my skin or the kink of my hair or the spread of my mouth has nothing to do with what you are listening to.

We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.

When ever Buddhism has taken root in a new land, there has been a certain variation in the style in which it is observed. The Buddha himself taught differently according to the place, the occasion and the situation of those who were listening to him.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul.

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

The majority of people have no understanding of the things with which they daily meet, nor, when instructed, do they have any right knowledge of them, although to themselves they seem to have.

It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says, 'Nothing good came of this' is not yet listening.

Karl Marx said, “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.” A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.