Quotes About Listening Rather Than Talking

#1. Were we as eloquent as angels we still would please people much more by listening rather than talking.

Charles Caleb Colton

#2. There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

Raymond Chandler

#3. its bad enough talking to yourself but worse when you realise you aren't listening

Tabitca Cope

#4. Do remember that communication is an exchange of thoughts. This means listening and speaking are necessary. You can't call something a conversation if you're the only one talking or listening.

Mia Conrad

#5. Lately I've been going to all these high schools talking to the students, answering their questions, listening to what they have to say. It has been an incredible journey to be around them and try to give them what my mother gave me.

Jill Scott

#6. If you invited a hedge wizard to a party, he would spend half the evening talking to your potted plant. And he would spend the other half listening.

Terry Pratchett

#7. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking.

G.K. Chesterton

#8. The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#9. It's like someone who prays every night saying God's a good listener. Just because you're talking to us doesn't mean we're listening. With me and God, you never really know.

Paul Neilan

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

Leslie Ludy

#11. The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.

Dylan Moran

#12. The formulation of a public relations strategy properly begins with listening, not talking.

Leonard Saffir

#13. Well, that was embarrassing. There was nothing wrong with talking to the voices in my head
unless everyone else was listening in.

Kate Carlisle

#14. A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.

Soren Kierkegaard

#15. The thing that I love about television there are no more than two or three people watching you at a time. If there are more than two or three people in a room they're talking to each other, they're not listening to you.

Betty White

#16. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn't sound dumb.

John Green

#17. There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.

Meg Greenfield

#18. People, by and large, would rather be talking than listening.

Mike Nichols

#19. She carried on talking. And as she did so, I realized there could be no cosmic consequence at all if I stopped listening, and with that realization I switched off the phone.

Matt Haig

#20. The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

Anna Quindlen

#21. She could talk. If she was a sphinx she could have talked, if she was a stone she could have talked. I wondered when she'd get tired and leave. Even after I stopped listening it was like being battered with tiny pingpong balls.

Charles Bukowski

#22. Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking.

Susan Jacoby

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

Brenda Ueland

#28. To do my job well, I have to be a good listener. The listening is so much more important than the talking.

Brad Listi

#29. 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

#30. The main thing that I loved about living alone was the silence. Sometimes simply talking to people was like listening to white noise. Often I could tune the sound out and be all right, but other times it was like hearing nails on a chalkboard - almost painful.

Adrianne Brooks

#31. It is extremely Sad to think that while nature is talking,humankind is not listening.

J.D. Masterson

#32. 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

#33. I mean, you can't have sex until you're married if you're Mormon. The first time I had sex, my parents found out. They were listening in on the phone while I was talking about sex to my girlfriend. They freaked out, man. They both cornered me in my bedroom.

Bert McCracken

#34. Talking to spirits is how you free them. Listening to them is how you help them crossover.

Zak Bagans