35 Listening Quotes To Inspire

In today's fast-paced world, where communication is often reduced to quick texts and fleeting moments, the art of listening can easily be overshadowed. Yet, genuine listening has the power to transform relationships, spark creativity, and foster deeper understanding. We've curated a collection of the top 35 listening quotes to inspire and remind you of the strength and beauty that lies in truly hearing one another. Dive in and let these timeless words encourage you to embrace the transformative power of listening in your daily interactions.

1. “You may see all that is around youBut you may feel nothing at all.So try and close your eyes so tightAnd listen to the night time fall.” - Stephen Cosgrove

2. “We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.” - Zeno of Citium, as quoted by Diogenes Laërtius

3. “This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.” - Sarah Dessen

4. “His head was on one side, listening to me, and that was such sweeness to me, that he listened intently. No one, it seemed, has ever listened like he does.” - Sue Woolfe

5. “Prayer is based on the remote possibility that someone is actually listening; but so is a lot of conversation. If the former seems far-fetched, consider the latter: even if someone is listening to your story, and really hearing, that person will disappear from existence in the blink of a cosmic eye, so why bother to tell this perhaps illusory and possibly un-listening person something he or she is unlikely to truly understand, just before the two of you blip back out of existence? We like to talk to people who answer us, intelligently if possible, but we do talk without needing response or expecting comprehension. Sometimes, the event is the word, the act of speaking. Once we pull that apart a bit, the action of talking becomes more important than the question of whether the talking is working-because we know, going in, that the talking is not working. That said, one might as well pray.” - Jennifer Michael Hecht

6. “I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk. ” - William Howard Taft

7. “I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older” - Lauren Oliver

8. “We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.” - Diogenes Laertius

9. “Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.” - Bernard M. Baruch

10. “She was like some kind of Energizer Bunny nonstop bitch machine...She needed three more husbands, so we could all take shifts listening to her.” - Victor Gischler

11. “Seseorang yang tak bisa mendengar, selamanya tak akan didengar.Always listening, always understanding.” - Adib Ibn Harbin

12. “He did it (listened) as the world's most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet.” - Stephen King

13. “It's not at all hard to understand a person; it's only hard to listen without bias.” - Criss Jami

14. “Intrusive, thoughtless people!" said K. as he turned back into the room. The supervisor may have agreed with him, at least K. thought that was what he saw from the corner of his eye. But it was just as possible that he had not even been listening as he had his hand pressed firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers.” - Franz Kafka

15. “You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it....You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.” - Chaim Potok

16. “When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.” - Banana Yoshimoto

17. “I never miss a good chance to shut up” - James Patterson

18. “Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs a considerable practice in listening.” - Epictetus

19. “I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.” - Anthony Kiedis

20. “It is silent, an anagram for listen. That is what I do. Listen while she remains silent.” - Eric Jerome Dickey

21. “The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent'.” - Alfred Brendel

22. “If you'd just learn to do as I say from the beginning, I wouldn't have to follow up your errors with reproving smirks and repeated I-told-you-sos.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

23. “For most of my life I've been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me.” - Steve Rasnic Tem

24. “...you listen first with the ears - then, you wait and listen for what your heart feels - then you consider what they've said - then, you reply ...” - John Geddes

25. “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.” - Brené Brown

26. “I had been running as fast as I could for all of my adult life. A person can’t listen effectively while running. A running mother is not able to pick up clues. She is not able to let go of her own agenda long enough to stop and listen.” - Irene Tomkinson

27. “...most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.” - Haruki Murakami

28. “Like most so-called debates between liberals and conservatives, they weren’t interested in listening or responding to each other. They were solely concerned with making sound bites.” - Bob Frey

29. “Vandals listen only when others are stronger.If vandals are equal or strongerTheir word is the last word.” - Dejan Stojanovic

30. “If God places a child before you, and you are too busy to wield either a positive or negative influence...you just did the later! You communicated that the child doesn't matter and isn't important.” - Wess Stafford

31. “One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.” - Bryant McGill

32. “Listening is a gift of spiritual significance that you can learn to give to others. When you listen, you give one a sense of importance, hope and love that he or she may not receive any other way. Through listening, we nurture and validate the feelings one has, especially when he or she experiences difficulties in life.” - H. Norman Wright

33. “Sorry," I said. There was little healing power in the word, but maybe the Inspectre wasn't looking to heal. Maybe he didn't want someone to fix it. It had been broken too long for me to think anything I said would actually help. It was like trying to put a Band-Aid on a shark bite. Sometimes people just needed to vent and get it out of their system.” - Anton Strout

34. “Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what’s going on, our ears don’t have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re about to hear, it’s always too late.” - Javier Marías

35. “She told me she loved me. She told me a lot of things. Some of those things were true, and some of those may or may not have been true. It’s kind of hard to tell, because to be honest, I wasn’t listening.
” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo