"Like the Bard's King Harry before Agincourt she [Princess Diana] captured the hearts of the foot soldiers of a
nation, wandering among her fellow Britons and listening."
-- "Diana" (an editorial) CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, Sept. 2, 1997

Our first responsibility as effective listeners is to understand ourselves
as communicators. Just as the sources of the communication message
shout be trained in self-intrapersonal communication, so, too, should listeners
know themselves. Brook states his case eloquently.
-- Andrew Wolvin & Carolyn Coakley, Listening

Easy listening exists only on the radio.
-- David Barkan

The best way to persuade people is with your ears — by listening to them.
-- Dean Rusk

Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are preoccupied with your appearance, or with impressing the other, or are trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops talking, or are debating about whether what is being said is true or relevant or agreeable. Such matters have their place, but only after listening to the word as the word is being uttered.
Listening is a primitive act of love in which a person gives himself to another's word, making himself accessible and vulnerable to that word.
-- William Stringfellow, Friend's Journal

I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.
-- Diane Sawyer

Instead of listening to that is being said to them, many managers are already listening to what they are going to say
-- Anonymous

An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of
one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's
world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually and
extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true
listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the
other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will fell less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to
open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to
appreciate each other more and more, and the duet dance of love is begun again.
-- M. Scott Peck, MD, The Road Less Traveled

The way to stay fresh is you never stop traveling, you never stop listening. You never stop asking people what they think.
-- Rene McPherson, former chairman, Dana

The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say. It's terribly important for everyone to get involved. Our best ideas come from clerks and stock boys.
-- Sam Walton

Listening is an attitude of the heart, a genuine desire to be with another which both attracts and heals.
-- J. Isham

"Usually a person relates to another under the tacit assumption that the other shares his view of reality, that indeed there is only one reality...."
-- Paul Watzlawick - Psychologist

You're not listening... well, your heart is not.
-- Merlin in Excalibur (1981)

Careful the things you say, children will listen. Careful the things you do, children will see. And learn. Children may not obey, but children will listen. Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn what to be. Careful before you say, "Listen to me." Children will listen.
-- Witch in Into the Woods (1990)

We need a definite purpose, a specific reason for listening, other wise we don't pay attention and don't really
hear or understand.
-- Robert Montgomery - Listening Made Easy

The jungle speaks to me because I know how to listen.
-- Mowgli in The Jungle Book (1994)

It is difficult for anyone to speak when you listen only to yourself.
-- Lorna Bounty in The Man with a Cloak (1951)

he greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
-- Daniel W. Davenport

As friends, we don't see eye to eye, but then we don't hear ear to ear either.
-- Buster Keaton

"The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."
-- Henry David Thoreau

If I can listen to what he tells me, if I can understand how it seems to him if I can sense the emotional flavor
which it has for him, then will be releasing the portent forces of change within him."
"Man's inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively, skillfully, and with understanding to
another person."
-- Carl Rogers, psychologist.

"Few people... have had much training in listening. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the
time chiefly concerned with getting our own view across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a
tedious interruption of the our of our own ideas.
-- S.I. Hayakawa, How to Attend a Conference

If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small
piece of fluff in his ear.
-- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
-- Karl Menninger

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti

The art of listening needs it highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying."
-- Sidney Harris, columnist

"One friend, one person who is truly understanding, who take the trouble to listen to us as we consider our
problems, can change our whole outlook on the work."
-- Elton Mayo, behavioral scientist

"When a person knows that he has a good listener to talk to, he'll share his thoughts more fully, which in turn,
makes it easier for the caseworker to help him with his problems. And, moreover, as he talks, the person
needing help often finds a good solution to his problems himself.
-- Florence Holis, social worker

To be listened to is, generally speaking, a nearly unique experience for most people. It is enormously
stimulating. It is small wonder that people who have been demanding all their lives to be heard so often fall
speechless when confronted with one who gravely agrees to lend an ear. Man clamors for the freedom to
express himself and for knowing that he counts. But once offered these conditions, he becomes frightened.
-- Robert C. Murphy

A good listener tries to understand what the other person is saying. In the end he may disagree sharply, but
because he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is he is disagreeing with.
-- Kenneth A. Wells

Opportunities are often missed because we are broadcasting when we should be listening.
-- Anonymous

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.
-- Wilson Mizner

Small talk deserves small talk responses.
-- Thomas G. Banville

Because of their inner rigidities, fears and anxieties, these listeners dread the mutual exchange of ideas and beliefs. They listen only to what they feel they should be attentive to, blotting out larger areas of wariness and thus avoiding the basic truth involved in issues an situations. They are constantly suspicious and cautious about other people's reactions and set up emotional filters which disturb effective listening. Because of their hypersensitivity to criticism and rebuff, they are constantly on their guard and on the defensive. They listen with prejudiced opinions, preconceived notions, condemnations and cynical attitudes.
They fear facing or listening to the truth about themselves and as a result their hearing becomes colored with absolute judgments, "black and white" evaluations and distorted emotional reactions.
-- Dominick A. Barbara, The Art Of Listening

The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.
-- Anonymous

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.
-- Dr. Joyce Brothers

Power tends to corrupt and
absolute power corrupts absolutely
-- Lord Acton

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for
words are slippery and thought is viscous.
-- Henry B. Adams

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
-- Henry B. Adams.

..Adult listening behaviors become habitual. Our listening behaviors have been acquired and reinforced over a long period of time. As adults we rarely think about how we listen or consider that it takes time to change old habits. We listen the way we do because we have learned to listen that way.
Among the most influential operating factors during communication are the filtering agents of senders and receivers. Similar to filters used with a camera lens, filtering agents allows the passage or blockage or coloring of other elements. Consider how professional photographers use filters designed to let in some rays of light while screening out other rays that may ruin or distort a picture. While a filter is in use, it becomes a part of the camera and affects the final outcomes of the picture. Camera filters are changed to get desired results. Similar to a camera lens, filter agents communication with others. Filtering agents such as past work experiences,
educational training, opinions, emotions, attitudes, feelings, and language abilities influences how you send and receive messages. Understanding your personal filtering agents puts you in a position to maximize your communication and listening success.
Effective listeners remember that "words have no meaning - people have meaning." The assignment of meaning to a term is an internal process; meaning comes from inside us. And although our experiences, knowledge and attitudes differ, we often misinterpret each other's messages while under the illusion that a common understanding has been achieved.
-- Lyman K. Steil, Larry L. Barker, & Kittie W. Watson, Effective Listening Key To Your Success

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
-- Alfred Adler

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
-- Aesop

Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything.
-- Aesop

We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.
-- Aesop

Like walking and thinking and breathing and talking, like all of the things that we seen to be doing naturally, we take our understanding of the [communication - mine] process for granted. We assume we know what we're talking about. We smile knowingly and nod knowingly at each other when we discuss communication.
....It's extremely difficult to introduce vital new knowledge when everybody assumes he already knows all that needs to be known."
At best. That task is a most difficult one. If you believe you already know most of what you need to know or could know about human communication; if you think all that's left to be learned about human communication is a few techniques; if you found yourself nodding your head with an "Ah, yes, this is about communication - I know what it's about"... Then we have a real communication problem!
Human communicating is not a science. It is very much still - and perhaps always will be - essentially an art.
Technically, we can no more understand communicating by being able to utter, "there's a communication problem here’ than we could understand nuclear physics through our sheer ability to say: "this looks to me like a problem in nuclear physics." Listening to a noisy automobile engine and musing, "sounds like the tappets to me," is not the same as being able to repair or adjust noisy tappets.
An even more formidable obstacle is our inclination to assume we understand human communication simply because we do it.
As a result of the sort of education and training in communication that has been available, it seems natural for us to think in terms of how-to-communicate rather than how-to-be-communicated-with. Yet the one is no more important that the other. The ability to be communicated-with is just as important to personal or professional competence as is the ability to communicate-to others. Perhaps more so.
Further, our inclination to think of communication essentially in terms of manipulating or affecting others- of communicating-to others - stands as an obstacle to a more advantageous view of communication as something when occurs in the receiver. Overemphasis on the origination of statements to be transmitted detracts for the primary focus that should be placed upon the creating of the message within the receiver, the message upon which he will base his thinking and his behavior.
-- Lee Thayer, Communication And Communication Systems

The paper burns, but the words fly away.
- Ben Joseph Akiba

Leisure time is that five or six hours when you sleep at night.
-- George Allen

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
-- Woody Allen

To see one's self accurately; to understand and know one's self clearly and honestly’ to have acquired those abilities an characteristics associated with a strong, wholesome, self-concept-these objectives are directly related to liking one's self, being confident in one's self, and in relating and living effectively and satisfyingly with others.
-- William D Brooks, Speech Communication

The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you.
-- Woody Allen

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.
-- Muhammad Ali

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.
-- Marcel Archard

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
-- Henri-Frederic Amiel

In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.
-- Idi Amin Dada

Rogers and Farson (1973) note the risks taken by one who practices active listening in order to empathize with the speaker. In achieving understanding of a situation from the speaker's point of view, one risks being changed by the experience to coming to see within oneself the world as that other person does. One will sense deeply the feelings of someone else so that one understands the meaning that person's experience have for him. When one achieves this, one risks a shift in thinking to the terms of another. One may come to see the world as this person sees it; to find it threatening to set aside, even for a short time, one's own beliefs to try to
interpret and evaluate from another's view point. The willingness to do this requires a strong sense of one's self.
It requires confidence in one's own feeling and values.
Everyone has a basic human need to be recognized and acknowledged by others. Listening is one of the most fundamental means by which this is achieved. When someone engages in the act of listening, having chosen to listen to a particular person, that person's existence is affirmed, as is his importance as a speaker. By nonverbal actions alone, the listener tells that person he has importance in the listener's frame of reference.
Another result of acknowledging the speaker will be that there will be better speakers to listen to: if one listens better, most speakers may be stimulated to speak more effectively.
Anyone who wishes to improve skill in listening must be willing to expend the time and effort to permit others to express their feelings and ideas. To do this, one must be willing to give something of oneself. This requires that the person must, first of all, be receptive. Receptiveness is a deliberate action, consciously performed with the intention of relating in some way to the other.
-- Vonicle Smith, A Handbook Of Communication Skills, edited By Owen Hargie

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity to be otherwise.
-- Maya Angelou

God is not dead. He is alive and working; working on a less ambitious project.
-- Anonymous

Never argue with a fool - people might not know the difference.
-- Anonymous

The fewer facts you have in support of an opinion, the stronger your emotional attachment to that opinion.
-- Anonymous

You can't walk a mile in someone else's shoes until you take off your own shoes .
Communication works for those who work at it.
A good listener truly wants to know the speaker
-- John Powell S.J. "Will The Real Me Please Stand Up?"

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.
-- Marcel Archard

We make war that we may live in peace.
-- Aristotle

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
-- Aristotle

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
-- Neil Armstrong

To communicate is risky, to not communicate is riskier.

Ingratitude is sharper than a serpents tooth.
-- King Lear, Act 1 scene 1

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
-- Francis Bacon

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
-- Walter Bagehot

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
-- James Baldwin

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
-- James Baldwin

Listen

When I ask you to listen to me
And you start giving advice,
You have not done what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me
And you begin to tell me why I shouldn't feel that way,
You're trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me
And you feel you have to do something to solve my problems,
You have failed me, strange as that may seem.

Listen!

All I ask was that you listen, not talk or do.
Just hear me.
Advice is cheap:
25 cents will get you both Dear Abby and Billy Graham in the same newspaper.
And I can do for myself; I am not helpless.
Maybe discouraged and faltering,
Maybe lonely and isolated and grieving and searching, But not helpless.
When you do something for me that I can do and need to do for myself, You contribute to my fear and to my
weakness.
But when you accept, as a simple fact, that I do feel what I feel,
No matter how irrational,
Then I can quite trying to convince you
And you can get about the business of understanding What's behind this irrational feeling.
And when that's clear, the answers are obvious and I donut need advice.
Perhaps that's why prayer works, sometimes, for some people, Because God is mute and doesn't try to give
advice or try to fix things. He just listens, and lets you work it out for yourself.
So please listen and just hear me.
And if you want to talk,
Wait a minute for your turn.
And Ill listen to you.

The future is like heaven - everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
-- James Baldwin

It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.
-- Tallulah Bankhead

God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
-- Imamu Amiri Baraka

Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. the most terrifying thing is what people do want.
-- Clive Barnes

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
-- Brendan Behan

The Wall

Their wedding picture mocked them from the table, these two, Whose minds no longer touched each other.
They lived with such a heavy barricade between them that neither Battering ram of words nor artilleries of touch
could break it down.
Somewhere, between the oldest child's first tooth and the youngest Daughters graduation, they lost each other.
Throughout the years, each slowly unraveled that tangled ball of string Called self, and as they tugged at stubborn knots, each his Searching self from the other.
Sometime she cried at night an begged the whispering darkness to tell her who she was.
He lay beside her, snoring like a hibernating bear, unaware of her winter.
Once, after they had made love, he wanted to tell her how afraid he Was of dying, but fearing to show his naked soul, he spoke Instead of the beauty of her eyes.
She took a course in modern art, trying to find her self in colors Splashed upon a canvas, and complained to other women about Men who were insensitive.
He climbed into a tomb called "the office," wrapped his mind in a shroud Of paper figures and buried himself in customers.
Slowly, the wall between them rose, cemented my the mortar of indifference.
One day, reaching out to touch each other, they found a barrier they Could not penetrate, and recoiling from the coldness of the stone, Each retreated from the stranger on the other side.
For when love dies, it is not in a moment of angry battle, nor when Fiery bodies lose their heat.
It lies panting, exhausted, expiring at the bottom of a wall It could not scale.

The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something
to drink and somebody to love you.
-- Brendan Behan

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
-- Ambrose Bierce

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
-- Otto von Bismarck

Universal suffrage is the government of a house by its nursery.
-- Otto von Bismarck

The first sign of a nervous breakdown is when you start thinking your work is terribly important. -- Milo Bloom

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
-- Niels Bohr

Improved listening skills will not necessarily result in improved listening. We must apply these skills. We must be convinced that it pays to listen. The combination of desire (I want to listen), effort (I'm going to work at it), and skill (I know how to do it) will result in improved listening.
-- Donald L. Kirkpatrick, No-Nonsense Communication

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
-- Derek Bok

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes." They will say, "Women don't have what it takes.
-- Clare Boothe Luce

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there.
-- Clare Boothe Luce

No good deed goes unpunished.
-- Clare Boothe Luce

The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood.
-- Ralph Nichols

When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.
-- James H. Boren

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
-- Victor Borge

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
-- Alec Bourne

"If speaking is silver, then listening is gold."
-- Turkish Proverb

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
-- General Omar Bradley

Grub first, then ethics.
-- Bertolt Brecht

I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant

Please don't ask me what the score is, I'm not even sure what the game is.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant

"The principle of listening, someone has said, is to develop a big ear rather than a big mouth."
-- Howard G. and Jeanne Hendricks

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.
- Ashleigh Brilliant

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
-- Jacob Bronowski

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
-- Sam Brown

Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow.
-- Mathew Browne

"Now a man cannot listen to another while he will have all the talk and discourse to himself."
-- C.H. Spurgeon

As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.
-- Anita Bryant

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.
-- William F. Buckley

Before you kill something make sure you have something better to
replace it with; something better than political opportunist slamming
hate horse shit in the public park.
-- Charles Bukowski

We love your adherence to democratic principles.
-- William F. Buckley

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
-- Nicholas Murray Butler

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
-- Samuel Butler

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than
the bore.
-- Samuel Butler

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know
how to lie well.
-- Samuel Butler

One was never married, and that's his hell; another is, and that's his
plague.
-- Robert Burton

The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. - James B. Cabell

Men willingly believe what they wish.
-- Julius Caesar

It is better to be defeated on principle than to win on lies.
-- Arthur Calwell

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.
-- Simon Cameron

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
-- Albert Camus

When I sell liquor, its called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, its called hospitality.
-- Al Capone

You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
-- Al Capone

Vote early and vote often.
-- Al Capone

Anyone who can walk to the welfare office can walk to work.
-- Al Capp

It is long accepted by the missionaries that morality is inversely proportional to the amount of clothing people wore.
-- Alex Carey

In time of war the first casualty is truth.
-- Boake Carter

Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice Doggie!" till you can find a rock.
-- Wynn Catlin

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
-- Dick Cavett

Everything beautiful has its moment and then passes away.
-- Luis Cernuda

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

In some cases non-violence requires more militancy than violence.
-- Cesar Chavez

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
-- Chinese proverb

The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.
-- Chinese Proverb

I like a man who grins when he fights.

A cat will look down to a man. A dog will look up to a man. But a pig will look you straight in the eye and see his equal.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
-- Winston Churchill

Who will protect the public when the police violate the law?
-- Ramsey Clark

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.
-- Eldridge Cleaver

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
-- Eldridge Cleaver

War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.
-- Georges Clemenceau

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
-- Charles Caleb Colton

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
-- Georges Clemenceau

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
-- Confucius

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
-- Cyril Connolly

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
-- Joseph Conrad

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
-- Laurence Coughlin

A man feared that he might find an assassin; Another that he might find a victim. One was wiser than the other.
-- Stephan Crane