Listening Quotes | Listeners Unite

Listeners Unite!

Some Listening Quotes

Here are some words of listening wisdom I'd gathered to share at Listeners Unite. I've also included several favorites in The Art of Listening anthology. There, you'll find listening insights from Rita Dove, Tyler Meritt, Wislawa Szymborska, Yo-Yo Ma, contributors to Merna Ann Hecht's Stories of Arrival: Refugee & Immigrant Youth Voices, and more. 💖✨

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.” - Carl Jung

"We must face with courage the fact that when we succeed in "hearing a person out,' our own position may become quite modified." - Ralph Nichols

“The ear is the road to the heart.” - Voltaire

“The first duty of love is to listen.” - Paul Tillich

“What people really need is a good listening to.” - Mary Lou Casey

“For in the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.” - Baba Dioum

“Man’s mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” - Albert Einstein

“Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.” - Mark Twain

"The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” - Jean Cocteau

“Let your heart guide you. It whispers, so listen closely.” - The Land Before Time

“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to slowly be born.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.” - Seneca

“Much silence makes a powerful noise.” - African Proverb

“I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it... It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it.” - from The Chosen, by Chaim Potok

“If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.” - Winnie the Pooh (& AA Milne) :)

Pooh - for The Art of Listening Anthology - LED.jpeg

Thank you for listening.

~ Above: The closing image from The Art of Listening Anthology, hand-colored by the editor ~
This Winnie the Pooh illustration by A. A. Milne is in the public domain.