86 Quotes About The Art Of Listening

In a world brimming with noise and constant chatter, the art of listening often stands as an overlooked yet powerful tool for connection and understanding. Whether it's in personal relationships, the workplace, or casual interactions, the ability to truly listen can transform conversations and foster deeper bonds. Our curated collection of 86 quotes about the art of listening seeks to celebrate this subtle yet profound skill. These quotes, drawn from thinkers, leaders, and artists, offer insights into the transformative power of listening, encouraging us to pause, hear, and truly engage with those around us. Dive into this collection and explore how listening can elevate communication and enrich your life.

1. “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” - Ernest Hemingway

2. “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” - Leo Buscaglia

3. “You're short on ears and long on mouth.” - John Wayne

4. “Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.” - Madeleine L'Engle

5. “Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.” - Eudora Welty

6. “There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.” - G.K. Chesterton

7. “Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” - Stephen R. Covey

9. “I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.” - Gustave Flaubert

10. “And Edward was surprised to discover that he was listening. Before, when Abilene had talked to him, everything had seemed so boring, so pointless. But now, the stories Nellie told struck him as the most important thing in the world and he listened as if his life depended on what she said." (page 69)” - kate dicamillo

11. “Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still. (page 103)” - kate dicamillo

12. “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.” - William Hazlitt

13. “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

14. “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

15. “It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.” - Henry David Thoreau

16. “There's more than one way to tell each other things, and there's more than one way to listen, too.” - Katherine Hannigan

17. “An appreciative listener is always stimulating.” - Agatha Christie

18. “The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.” - Ralph G. Nichols

19. “When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.” - Madeleine L'Engle

20. “I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.” - Reif Larsen

21. “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

22. “You can't fake listening. It shows.” - Raquel Welch

23. “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

24. “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

25. “An argument in apologetics, when actually used in dialogue, is an extension of the arguer. The arguer's tone, sincerity, care, concern, listening, and respect matter as much as his or her logic - probably more. The world was won for Christ not by arguments but by sanctity: "What you are speaks so loud, I can hardly hear what you say.” - Peter Kreeft

26. “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” - David W. Augsburger

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

28. “I love people who play guitars on roofs!" said Rose, hopping along the pavement in one of her sudden happy moods. "Don't you?""Never knew anyone else who did it!""Don't you like Tom?""Of course I do. But I don't know about all the other guitar-on-roof players! They might be really awful people, with just that one good thing about them. Playing guitars on roofs... or bagpipes... Or drums... Sarah would like that, and Saffy could have the bagpipes! Caddy could have a harp.... What about Mum?""One of those gourds filled with beans!" said Rose at once. "And Daddy could have a grand piano. On a flat roof. With a balcony and pink flowers in pots around the edge! And I'll have a very loud trumpet! What about you?""I'll just listen," said Indigo.” - Hilary McKay

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

30. “If a man seeks you to understand him; listen closely, for what is really going on is nothing more that you manifesting your desire to seek yourself on a plateau of awareness that is not tangible” - Jeremy Aldana

31. “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

32. “The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.” - Germain G. Glidden

33. “Maybe you’re so good at listening that you have no idea when to speak.” ~Braeden” - S.M. Boyce

34. “Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening” - Terence McKenna

35. “They praised his modesty and did not listen to him, for listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

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

37. “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

38. “Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears.” - Criss Jami

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

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

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

44. “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

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

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

47. “What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.” - Annie Dillard

48. “The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried.” - Annie Dillard

49. “At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.” - Annie Dillard

50. “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

51. “Annie clouded up. For a second, he thought she was going to erupt, and flinched. She saw that...and got control of herself with an visible effort. She took three deep breaths, each longer than the last, and her features became serene.All at once it seemed totally clear to Mike that she was right and he was nuts - that his ingenius theory was nonsense, childish, fantasty bullshit. His conviction evaporated, and he was ashamed. He felt his cheeks grow hot, groped for words with which to backtrack -"I have to admit I have no better explanation for the the facts," Annie said slowly.Again, Mike did an emotional instant 180. "Holy shit -"She held up a hand. "I am going to think now. Very hard, for a long time. You will be as quiet as possible while I do." She got up from the computer, went to the bed, and lay down. "Think yourself, or read, or play games with the headphones on, or go Topside if you like." She clasped her hands on her belly, closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep” - Spider Robinson

52. “There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. This is no fulfillment of our obligation, and it is certain that here too our attitude toward our brother only reflects our relationship to God. It is little wonder that we are no longer capable of the greatest service of listening that God has committed to us, that of hearing our brother's confession, if we refuse to give ear to our brother on lesser subjects. Secular education today is aware that often a person can be helped merely by having someone who will listen to him seriously, and upon this insight it has constructed its own soul therapy, which has attracted great numbers of people, including Christians. But Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

53. “Communication is defined not by what is being said but by what is being heard. For this reason, it is vital that you gain a good appreciation of how other people will listen—interpret, process, and assign meaning— to what you have to say before you can influence them effectively.” - Margie Warrell

54. “...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

55. “She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.” - Henry James

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

57. “Sometimes its not the strength but gentleness that cracks the hardest shells.” - Richard Paul Evans

58. “The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.” - Tara Brach

59. “We teach what we need to learn. And we teach it until we get it.” - Irene Tomkinson

60. “...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

61. “Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.” - Bryce Courtenay

62. “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

63. “My parents are great listenersWhich is why I never tell them anything” - Sonya Sones

64. “For a woman's words to wound would require a man to listen first!” - Meredith Duran

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

66. “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

67. “Silence made space for other people's words, which was important for those who needed to be listened to.” - Rachel Simon

68. “The art of hearing what somebody has to say is actually, listening.” - Colette Ruland Parrino

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

70. “How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?” - Alexander McCall Smith

71. “The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener— a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.” - Dale Carnegie

72. “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

73. “Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.” - Shannon L. Alder

74. “I think she's brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.” - Lauren DeStefano

75. “This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.” - Walter Benjamin

76. “A good teacher is one, that never stops listening; a good listener is one, that never stops teaching.” - Anthony Liccione

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “Cooperation is a higher moral principle than competition.” - Bryant McGill

81. “Don't assume, because you are intelligent, able, and well-motivated, that you are open to communication, that you know how to listen.” - Robert K. Greenleaf

82. “the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.” - Terry Tempest Williams

83. “Each of us has one. Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.” - Terry Tempest Williams

84. “Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest.” - Terry Tempest Williams

85. “I always listen to what I can leave out.” - Miles Davis

86. “When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.” - Frank McCourt