Listening's Quotes

#1. Listening's reading if you close your eyes. Music's a wood you walk through.

David Mitchell

#2. When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul's energy; as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.

Mark Nepo

#3. It's amazing what we lose in life by listening to fear, instead of listening to God.

Joyce Meyer

#4. Sainthood emerges when you can listen to someone's tale of woe and not respond with a description of your own.

Andrew Mason

#5. You can tell a person's past, present and future by listening to the words they use.

Robert Kiyosaki

#6. It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience - that's why most people have kids, isn't it?

Robin Epstein

#7. I've never sung anywhere without giving the people listening to me a chance to join in - as a kid, as a lefty, as a man touring the U.S.A. and the world, as an oldster. I guess it's kind of a religion with me. Participation. That's what's going to save the human race.

Pete Seeger

#8. See, what I don't like listening to is when writers go, 'And then the person cries.' 'Or the person does this.' It's there, but it's not the Bible. I wait and see what happens to me on the day.

Kim Coates

#9. I do not want to leave in [U.S.] ... I cannot make that clear enough to immigration authorities who may be listening to this interview. I don't want to leave, so please don't make me.

John Oliver

#10. If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there's a hell, she's standing.

Roddy Doyle

#11. So, do you have to send The Piano Man the secret code word to come down?"
"Did you just call Josh The Piano Man?"
"Well, I thought we should have a code name for him in case anyone's listening when we talk about you, and your mom said he plays the piano.

Jennifer Comeaux

#12. The moment in which you make somebody laugh, you're only doing it to make them laugh and be happy. Then afterward you can be like, 'Oh, I just want the attention. I feel so good that everybody's listening to me and I got the approval that I need.'

T. J. Miller

#13. There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

G.K. Chesterton

#14. In a sense, I'm always hearing music of some sort, whether it's people talking or surface noise or whatever, because there is no privacy. So when I'm by myself, I just kind of like to be and reflect, and I can't do that when I'm listening to music. Because it's someone else's reflections, not mine.

Sarah McLachlan

#15. The key to good listening isn't technique, it's desire. Until we truly want to understand the other person, we'll never listen well.

Steve Goodier

#16. It's too bad music can't be like movies. For me, playing music and listening to music and creating music is very environmental. It creates a certain environment; it sets a specific mood.

Avey Tare

#17. ...I watched the day slip into night, noting the wondrous tonal transformations of the sunset on its dimmer switch, how blood-orange can shade imperceptibly into ice-blue on the knife-edge of the horizon, listening to the sea's interminable call for silence - shh, shh, shh.

William Boyd

#18. Ain't you been listening? I'm YUSUKE URAMESHI... the same ornery dawg you've always known and loved. So I have a DEMON ANCESTOR! Big Deal! I'm still going To KICK Sensui's sorry butt! -Yusuke

Yoshihiro Togashi

#19. I lay curled in a fetal position one night, listening to my wife's voice. In the evenings, she just talked, speaking light into my darkness by reading verses to me. I needed a touchstone and she knew it, so she kept gently pointing toward Christ. She set aside her fears to speak into my own.

Ben Palpant

#20. As a teenager I was very clear that I wasn't in the church just to toe the line, but I saw there was a capacity within Christianity and the bible not to fall into line but to question the status quo, that's what kept me in the church. I was listening to the sort of music that did that questioning.

Alan Green

#21. When you hear Portuguese, if you're listening fleetingly, it's as if you're hearing Russian, which never happens with Spanish. Because the Portuguese and the Russians share the open vowels and the dark "L," the "owL" sound.

Gregory Rabassa

#22. There was something in the way he posed a question and followed it up with a generous pause, I think, that drew me out. I had never noticed all the pauses that were missing from most people's conversations.

Suzanne Rindell

#23. When someone is in a car accident and they're driving at 100 mph, drunk, who's tape do you think his listening to at that time? Think about it.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#24. Since neither of us needs sleep we take night buses, sharing earphones and listening to knitting podcasts. If anyone else on the bus notices anything about us they assume it's because they're drunk. I've

Helen Oyeyemi

#25. I'm actually listening to Turner's advice. I know it sounds stupid as hell, but sometimes, if you dig through his words, there are little nuggets of pure idiot wisdom, the sweetest kind there is.

C.M. Stunich

#26. I think that it's high time that the Prime Minister stopped making excuses for bad policy and started listening to the forgotten families of Australia.

Tony Abbott

#27. I grew up with my older brother listening to hip hop, and Jay-Z was the main person I listened to. When it comes to his word play, he's just out of this world. That's my biggest inspiration when it comes to writing lyrics.

Tinchy Stryder

#28. DJ-ing itself is not just about playing songs. The art of DJ-ing is presenting new songs to the crowd that they haven't heard before and creating a party vibe that's different than just listening to anybody's playlist. It's the only way to truly be big and respected in your craft.

TyDi

#29. As a result of listening to Aberhart, my father decided to leave the farm in 1927 to study at Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, Aberhart's training school.

Preston Manning

#30. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#31. I think a lot of the instincts you have doing comedy are really the same for doing drama, in that it's essentially about listening. The way I approach comedy, is you have to commit to everything as if it's a dramatic role, meaning you play it straight.

Will Ferrell

#32. You have to have a very holler-y sensibility. So they [the audience] know there's something worth listening to.

Margaret Cho

#33. It's nearly redundant to enumerate the reasons The Beatles are important. There are probably different reasons why The Beatles are important to a musician like myself and to the millions of Beatles fans who just enjoy listening to the music.

Todd Rundgren

#34. It's not like I listened to music and then stopped. I still don't have a real appreciation for music because I didn't really start listening to it until my 20s.

Kumail Nanjiani

#35. 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

#36. There's a preacher on the radio that says the Beatles are trying to hypnotize us and turn us all into Communists. I was listening to 'Hey, Jude' the other day and I had the urge to move to Cuba, so there might be something to it.

Chris Fabry

#37. No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.

Katherine Rundell

#38. It's important that when kids are listening to my music they don't think of it as their parent's music.

Mayer Hawthorne

#39. Faith isn't hearing the voice of God. It's listening and hearing nothing, but moving toward the miracle anyway. God hears us even when we don't hear him. Knowing that requires real faith.

Toni Sorenson

#40. When I was growing up, hip-hop music existed as American thing. If you listened to it you were listening to an American subculture, whereas now you're just listening to pop music that everyone shares. I think that's big.

Jonas Carpignano

#41. To me, country music is like the blues, but it's something very hip and - I don't want to say commercial - but it's very worldly and good listening.

Etta James

#42. I know that you're not supposed to think about dancing - what is that stupid expression, Sing like no one's listening, dance like no one's watching? - whatever.

Ned Vizzini

#43. Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.

W. H. Auden

#44. People in my family and camp who grew up listening to rap music love 'We Are Young.' I've heard it play at weddings. I've heard it in graduation parties. It's a big idea and big song.

Janelle Monae

#45. There's no way in hell I could have achieved what I have without being a good student and listening to the wisdom of others

Phil Heath

#46. But listening to him [Barack Obama] speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state Senate.

Sarah Palin

#47. I'm a man of different types of flavors and tastes. I like listening to things that inspire me. Older music, when instruments were being played, not just people hitting buttons. It's manlier. You're touching things to make sounds appear.

Action Bronson

#48. I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.

John Dufresne

#49. The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.

Flemming Rose

#50. This is the ultimate cruelty, isn't it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it's only air
too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.

David Henry Hwang

#51. She had never had a friend like this, in her private room, combing her hair, listening to her, talking about silly nonsense and the uselessness of one's parents; how the future was perfect, because they hadn't lived it yet.

Jessie Burton

#52. Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.

Tom Sharpe

#53. Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening.

William J. Clinton

#54. Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Rabindranath Tagore

#55. On my face extended flat
I was walloped with a cat
For listening at the key-hole of the door.

W.S. Gilbert

#56. It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor.

Grant Morrison

#57. It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn't just my dad's story, it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.

Vanessa Kerry

#58. Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote 'Talking Back to Prozac' (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 'Listening to Prozac' (1993) - a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients 'better than well.'

John Cornwell

#59. Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn't listening to you, that he's talking down to you, and that he isn't treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.

Malcolm Gladwell

#60. 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 Marias

#61. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

Aldous Huxley

#62. After he returned from Washington, Johnson came into Rowe's room and said, "I agree with everything you said." Perhaps he did agree - intellectually. But he didn't take the advice. He couldn't. He was beyond listening to warnings, as was demonstrated the next day, when the convention opened.

Robert A. Caro

#63. When punk came along, I found my generation's music. I grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, 'cause that was what got played in the house. But when I first saw the Stranglers, I thought, 'This is it.'

Robert Smith

#64. Steadfastness, that is holding on; patience, that is holding back; expectancy, that is holding the face up; obedience, that is holding one's self in readiness to go or do; listening, that is holding quiet and still so as to hear.

S.D. Gordon

#65. Listening is harvesting what is in the speaker's mind.

Michael Rost

#66. I think listening to real classic soul material made me learn how to feel music that's sung.

Gavin DeGraw

#67. But he's the most familiar thing in this house, and I fall asleep better, listening to Baz breathe, than I have since winter break started.

Rainbow Rowell

#68. I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it's so petty.

Imelda Marcos

#69. Dog's listen, or appear to listen. I think they hear blah, blah, blah, FOOD, blah, blah, blah. They appear to be listening to you.

Tim Allen

#70. I like that feeling in your brain when you've got seven things that you're holding in one moment-you heard that person cough, you heard that person laugh, you're also saying your line, you're also listening to the person who's talking to you.

Sarah Paulson

#71. Each of us knows when it's time to wake, eat and rest. We don't need to read a clock for these activities; we need to listen.

Gina Greenlee

#72. I believe in doing vinyl. As long as vinyl can still be made into a high-quality standard, I'm going to still make all my records as a side A and a side B because that's how I grew up listening to music.

Jason Molina

#73. If there's anyone in space, what they'll learn about the human race will be listening to us talking on the car phone.

Roger McGuinn

#74. A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut: it wandered away-away-to an indefinite distance-it died. The nightingale's song was then the only voice of the hour: in listening to it, I again wept.

Charlotte Bronte

#75. About happy endings. Folk like a story to finish well. Doesn't matter if that's true to life or not. Helps to hear about folk being content. About good folk getting what they deserve. While you're listening you can believe, for a bit, that you're good too. Worth a happy ending.

Juliet Marillier

#76. I have been listening," said Arthur, "but I'm not sure it's helped.

Douglas Adams

#77. You have permission to walk away from anything that doesn't feel right. Trust your instincts and listen to your inner-voice - it's trying to protect you.

Bryant McGill

#78. Do you connect to your customers by asking questions and genuinely listening to the answers? And if so, do you take the extra step to connect those customers to expertly personalized solutions? Do you take time to drastically adjust your message to meet each individual customer's needs?

Darren Hardy

#79. I would say the referees have the toughest game to call. I would say that there's a lot of officiating done by announcers, local announcers. Sometimes you should listen to a game from both feeds, and you'd think you were listening to completely different games.

David Stern

#80. Speaking up is important. Yet to speak up without listening is like banging pots and pans together: Even if it gets you attention, it's not going to get you respect.

Gina Barreca

#81. There is nothing wrong with listening. You can listen to people; you can hear people's concerns. You can keep an open mind and still be perfectly strong.

Bill De Blasio

#82. With improv, it's a combination of listening and not trying to be funny.

Kristen Wiig

#83. I've never really taken myself too serious. That's everybody else, listening to the music or whatever. I've always said what I've felt, said what I thought was right, but I've always had a comedic bone.

Ice Cube

#84. It's my fond hope that social networks such as Facebook will help users broaden their perspectives by listening to a different set of people than they encounter in their daily life. But I fear services such as Facebook may be turning us into imaginary cosmopolitans.

Ethan Zuckerman

#85. I got really tired of metal music. How do you pick what's good to sell when you're not totally into what you're listening to and marketing?

Blake Judd

#86. I just know I was part of a moment, and everyone showed up with love. I'm just blown away by this all but you can feel it in listening [Forest Green], and it's hard to listen 'cos sometimes life distracts you or you run away from listening. We didn't know what we were doing.

Andy Kim

#87. A lot of people listening to music now don't listen to the songs or lyrics at all. They just go, "Good tones ... " and that's it.

Alex Scally

#88. In order to understand the impact you can have on another's life by listening you need to first be intimate with the experience of being heard.

Madelaine Standing

#89. I want to tell him more, too. I always want to tell him more, but now that I know he's listening- really listening- it means something different.

David Levithan

#90. Then the early punk rock period with Television and the Ramones. That's what I loved- that's what I was listening to immediately prior to when I started to play.

Arto Lindsay

#91. Let's not forget that one poll after another clearly demonstrates that well over 50% of Russian citizens still wants both socialism and the USSR back. And the Russian government is listening.

Andre Vltchek

#92. Are you learning to say things after listening to God, or are you saying things and trying to make God's word fit in?

Oswald Chambers

#93. Prayer is not first and foremost talking to God, it's first and foremost listening to God.

Leslie Ludy

#94. The first time I started listening to Irish music, I had a very strong connection. Strangely enough, there's a great many Japanese melodies and vocal styles that sound very much like Hungarian music. You start seeing all these cross-references and comparative, independent musical cultures.

Tom Waits

#95. I love to cook, my husband and I collect wine, and in my head, I am always on Sullivan's Island, walking the beach listening to the song of the ocean.

Dorothea Benton Frank

#96. Listening to music for me is like homework. Music will give me enjoyment, but as soon as it's giving me that enjoyment, I want to analyse it, and then it becomes work. Why does it sound like that? How? ... then I dissect it.

Steve Winwood

#97. I'm listening to early Cash Money, I'm listening to Juvenile, I'm listening to Waka Flocka, I'm listening to Lil B, I'm listening to Brandy, Kanye - that's my home playlist.

Theophilus London

#98. When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another's need to speak be our silent statement.

Bryant McGill

#99. By listening to your higher self, or Atman, you can return to the truth that's already inside of you and in the process change not only yourself, but the entire world, through positivity and love.

Russell Simmons

#100. I don't think anybody is anybody else's moral compass. Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life. Or maybe it is.

Lou Reed