Top 67 Quotes About Listening To Understand
#1. The shortest path to peace is listening to understand, empathy and a willingness to compromise to alleviate suffering.
Jeffrey A. White
#2. What I wanted was for everyone listening to understand that these things mattered - not necessarily for me, but in this particular forum they mattered in terms of whether of not we were getting a person who should sit on the Supreme Court.
Anita Hill
#3. Most believe that the key to influence is communication - getting your point across clearly and speaking persuasively. In fact, if you think about it, don't you find that, while others are speaking to you, instead of really listening to understand, you are often busy preparing your response?
Stephen R. Covey
#4. I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future.
Alice Munro
#5. Everyday, we have to ask God for our assignment, we must not assume we understand His plan but rather surrender to His will daily.
E'yen A. Gardner
#6. I mean, I don't like sitting at a table with seven or eight people asking me questions and kind of listening to what I'm doing - scrutinizing my thoughts and things like that. I just don't like it. I can't understand how anyone would.
Joaquin Phoenix
#7. Listening to hard rock on the subway doesn't work for me, especially modern hard rock. Driving in L.A. helped me to understand the appeal of that music.
Paul Dano
#8. Because sometimes listening to something will connect to a feeling, it will allow you to emote subconsciously, and you don't even understand why you're in it.
Aldis Hodge
#9. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.
Stephen R. Covey
#10. Listening to what people in other countries are saying and trying to understand how they perceive their place in the world is essential to a future of peace and security at home and abroad.
Hillary Clinton
#11. I think that's what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it's not a secret at all; men just don't know how to listen.
Marlon James
#12. 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
#13. One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.
Marcel Proust
#14. I well understand why analysts demand high payment, for what can be more tedious than listening to another person recount his dreams?
Truman Capote
#15. Remain open-minded, even when you believe yourself to be a king among peasants. You never know what blessings can be gained or crises averted just by listening.
A.J. Darkholme
#16. To truly understand a person, stop talking and start listening.
Amey Hegde
#17. Yes, they think we're dumb. They call us the "common people." But I've been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what's so common about us. I think they're guilty of a gross mis-statement of fact-we are the uncommon people-
Ralph Ellison
#18. At times, it could be a bit difficult to understand everything that's being said when just listening, but I wanted the lyrics to be the first impression.
Frank Iero
#19. Is there a lot of stuff you don't understand? she said & I said pretty much the whole thing & she nodded & said that's what she thought, but it was nice to hear it anyways & we sat there on the porch swing, listening to the wind & growing up together.
Brian Andreas
#20. We sit on park benches and beaches and couches and hilltops, listening and dreaming seemingly to no particular purpose. But isn't it often the case that when we cease to move and think, we see and hear and understand a great deal?
Brian Doyle
#21. He who does not want to understand the Other has no right to say that what the Other does or says makes no sense.
Thomas Szasz
#22. No,you're officially banned from listening to us. Or thinking about this. Or even thinking about thinking about this, understand?
Kiersten White
#23. We need the discipline of magic, of consciousness-change, in order to hear and understand what the earth is saying to us. And listening to the earth, doing the rituals the land asks us for, giving back what we are asked for, will also bring us healing, expanded awareness and intensified life.
Starhawk
#24. Very often, when you're listening to a piece for the first time, you're listening through a model of other pieces that you know. At a certain point, a piece becomes idiosyncratic and you start to understand it on its own terms.
Paul Lansky
#25. Ski racing was drawing in time, I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was drawing in order to win.
Rachel Kushner
#26. If it's worth listening to, it's worth questioning until you understand it.
Seth Godin
#27. Ava's father believed that myths and fairy tales - like dreams - opened a window into the unconscious. by listening to the language of dreams and old tales, he said, all humans could learn to understand themselves and the world, better.
Kate Forsyth
#28. To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, "I am listening to this music," you are not listening.
Alan Watts
#29. I love discourse. I'm dying to have my mind changed. I'm probably the only liberal who read Treason, by Ann Coulter. I want to know, you understand? I like listening to everybody. This to me is the elixir of life.
Jack Nicholson
#30. What the public hates the most is when they think the politicians aren't listening to them. They understand that we can't solve all their problems with a snap of our fingers, but they sure want us to try because we are public servants.
Chuck Schumer
#31. The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand.
We listen to reply.
Stephen R. Covey
#32. I started [performing] so young that it might have just been that I kind of had to grow up and make people understand that I was worth listening to, even though I was a child.
Margaret Cho
#33. When people respond too quickly, they often respond to the wrong issue. Listening helps us focus on the heart of the conflict. When we listen, understand, and respect each other's ideas, we can then find a solution in which both of us are winners.
Gary Chapman
#34. For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
Tahir Shah
#35. Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.
Isak Dinesen
#36. Earn the right to be heard by listening to others. Seek to understand a situation before making judgments about it.
John C. Maxwell
#37. 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
#38. I don't think anyone listening to my music needs any special knowledge. They don't need to have a background in contemporary music. They don't need to go to new-music concerts all the time in order to be able to understand it.
Missy Mazzoli
#39. Are you quick to listen? Listening is an expression of humility and genuine concern for others. ... .If we want to truly know and understand other people, we have to care what they feel and think, not arrogantly assume that we already know.
Joshua Harris
#40. I suppose because I have a good ear, I could pick out harmonies and learn by ear. I still think that you have to have an ear for music to really be able to feel and understand what you're playing. You can learn by watching and listening to other people.
Mick Taylor
#41. What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.
James C. Scott
#42. Often when I find myself listening to music, at least 60 to 70% of it is foreign, so I don't understand a word of it. Melody to me will always be a million times more important than words.
Zach Condon
#43. 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
#44. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]
Helen Dunmore
#45. Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.
Umberto Eco
#46. Man, I would demand that artist come to the table with better variety. I would demand that musicians know music history, not just Hip-Hop, so that we could understand. The better your 'listening ear' is, the better your music will be.
Pharoahe Monch
#47. The major dilemma is that we tend to listen to reply, while all we should do is: listen to understand and feel.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
#49. Everything I know I learned by listening and watching. Nowadays people learn out of books instead. Doctors study what man has learned. I pray to understand what man has forgotten.
Vernon Cooper
#50. For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.
Tom Waits
#51. For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.
Robert Smith
#52. Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.
Parker J. Palmer
#53. We try to keep a good line of communication open with our children. It's not always about trying to just teach them every moment, but it's about listening to them and trying to understand them and gain that sense of communication so when they need to talk to someone, they know that we're there.
Victoria Osteen
#54. 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
#55. Listening to music is such an uplifting, spiritual thing. It's far-fetched to some - I understand that. But the way dance music brings people together, it's not a big stretch from hymns.
Kaskade
#56. One of the greatest experiences I ever had was listening to a conversation with Joni Mitchell and Wayne Shorter. Just to hear them talking, my mouth was open. They understand each other perfectly, and they make these leaps and jumps because they don't have to explain anything.
Herbie Hancock
#57. Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music.
Roberto Benigni
#58. The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years. To enter deep listening, I've had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I've had to lean into all I don't understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear.
Mark Nepo
#59. As I understand life at different levels, I can use music to express what these levels feel like to me. Hopefully the listener can be transported to this understanding by listening to the music.
Yanni
#60. It's not at all hard to understand a person; it's only hard to listen without bias.
Criss Jami
#61. It is not loving to impose our own grid onto others. We need to understand their situation and their needs accurately, and this comes from listening to them, not coming in with our own assumptions.
Matt Perman
#62. If you can concentrate on listening to another person - without your own viewpoint getting in the way, without judging or discarding or thinking of a response - for the simple purpose of taking in someone else's reality, you start to understand her.
L. Alison Heller
#63. Develop and exercise the ability to understand your partner's point of view so completely that you're able to believe them. Keep listening until you get their point of view so entirely that you understand how it is true for them.
Beth Banning
#64. Reading music is like listening to flowers. I don't understand the concept.
Paul Westerberg
#65. I fear that one day I will no longer understand desperation, and with that, I will slowly stop listening to what others have to say.
Courtney Milan
#66. Connecting with Canadians isn't about what you say, it's about what you're listening to. It's about what you understand.
Justin Trudeau
#67. Listening and trying to understand the needs of those we would communicate with seems to me to be the essential prerequisite of any real communication. And we might as well aim for real communication.
Fred Rogers
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