Listening Quotes - Page 33

• I realized I was more convincing to myself and to the people who were listening when I actually said what I thought, versus what I thought people wanted to hear me say.

  Ursula Burns

  People, Said, Wanted

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• Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.

  Adam Gopnik

  Writing, Winning, Your Side

  "Facing History" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 9, 2012.

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• Most of the time when something goes bad—a marriage, a war, a run of good luck—you don’t know it. It’s like in the cartoons, only less funny. You run off the cliff and just keep going—talking, listening to music, making plans, for years sometimes—except no announcer interrupts to say ‘Excuse me, collect call for Mr. Coyote’ to make you notice and make us laugh. You just wake up and fall.

  Mark Slouka

  Running, War, Fall

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• Fairy folk a-listening Hear the seed sprout in the spring, And for music to their dance Hear the hedgerows wake from trance, Sap that trembles into buds Sending little rhythmic floods Of fairy sound in fairy ears. Thus all beauty that appears Has birth as sound to finer sense And lighter-clad intelligence.

  George Eliot

  Spring, Sound, Bud

  George Eliot (2006). “Daniel Deronda: Easyread Edition”, p.346, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• 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.

  Annie Dillard

  Sea, Waiting, Mountain

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.67, Canongate Books

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• Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cat, Thinking, Symphony

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• A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.

  Erich Fromm

  Real, Reading, Expression

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Sane Society”, p.392, Open Road Media

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• I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of someone older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit, you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.

  Oscar Wilde

  Intellectual, Degenerates, Development

  Oscar Wilde, Isobel Murray (2008). “Oscar Wilde - The Major Works”, p.248, Oxford University Press

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• The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Attitude, Greatness, Odds

  "The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man" by Marshall McLuhan, (p. 21), 1951.

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• Say less than the other fellow and listen more than you talk; for when a man's listening he isn't telling on himself and he's flattering the fellow who is.

  George Horace Lorimer

  Men, Flattering, Fellows

  George Horace Lorimer (2008). “Letters from A Self-Made Merchant to His Son (EasyRead Super Large 20pt Edition)”, p.51, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York's Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  New York, Growing Up, Children

  Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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• Their [the evangelicals'] success also points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause... They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them.

  Barack Obama

  Issues, Religion, Needs

  "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream". Book by Barack Obama, content.time.com. October 17, 2006.

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• When I was young, I never bought records because my brother Joseph played saxophone and had a record player. I loved listening to his records: The Dorsey Brothers, Duke Ellington, all the big American jazz bands, and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Ernestine Anderson, and Kitty White, a singer from the US who was a friend of Nina Simone. Nobody in America seems to know about her, but she was quite popular in South Africa.

  Miriam Makeba

  Brother, Player, White

  "Miriam Makeba: Mama Africa Goes Home". J. Poet, Crawdaddy! Magazine, February 11, 2009.

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• Turn up the TV. No one listening will suspect, even your mother won't detect it, no your father won't know. they think that I've got no respect but everything means less than zero.

  Elvis Costello

  Mother, Zero, Father

  Song: Less Than Zero, Album: My Aim Is True, 1977

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• The subject matter covered in Carmina stays pretty basic: love, lust, the pleasures of drinking and the heightened moods evoked by springtime. These primitive and persistently relevant themes are nicely camouflaged by the Latin and old German texts, so the listener can actually feign ignorance while listening to virtually X-rated lyrics. (Veni Veni Venias! Come, come come now!)The music itself toggles between huge forces and a single voice, juxtaposing majesty and intimacy with ease.

  Carl Orff

  Latin, Drinking, Ignorance

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• [On how she goes about trying to live authentically] Well really listening to my point of view and if I am on a set, say, that doesn't really value a woman's point of view, regardless of how they feel, continuing to give my point of view and try to find a way to be heard and not diminishing myself because other people are diminishing me. Because that, I think, is the worst temptation that, you know, you judge yourself by how others are judging you, and to fall into that trap is to walk into the realm of self-annihilation.

  Jennifer Beals

  Fall, Thinking, Self

  Matthewsplace.com Interview, October 2009.

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• I am listening for the voices Which I heard in days of old.

  Caroline Norton

  Voice, Heard

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• Many, perhaps most, very learned people prefer the company of their books to sitting in a crowd listening to history and art being mangled; furthermore, it is unlikely that the venerable scholars will stand up afterward to declare, "This lecture was a load of crap." The more profound a professor's distaste with the proceedings, the more likely he is to melt away at the end of the talk.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Book, People

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• Naked girls with the heads of Marx and Malraux prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights, tried to give them a little joie de vivre but maybe it didn't take, their constant bickering and smallness, it's like a stroke of lightning, the world reminds you of its power, tracheotomies right and left, I am spinning, my pretty child, don't scratch, pick up your feet, the long nights, spent most of my time listening, this is a test of the system, this is only a test.

  Donald Barthelme

  Girl, Children, Night

  Donald Barthelme (1981). “Sixty stories”, Putnam Adult

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• Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are fêted in the waving grass And by the streamers of the white cloud And whispers of the wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

  Stephen Spender

  Heart, Air, Wind

  'I think continually of those who were truly great' (1933)

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• One thing is clear, the president of North Vietnam is not a fanatic. He is a very strong and determined man, but capable of listening, something that is very rare in a person of his position.

  Martin Niemoller

  Strong, Men, President

  "Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984" by James Bentley, (p. 225), 1984.

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• If a teacher wants to know something why doesn't she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she's the teacher!

  Bel Kaufman

  Teacher, Looks, Benefits

  Bel Kaufman (2012). “Up the Down Staircase”, p.221, Open Road Media

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• For history, I say again, has this and this only for its own: if a man will start upon it, he must sacrifice to no God but Truth; he must neglect all else; his sole rule and unerring guide is this - to think not of those who are listening to him now, but of the yet unborn who shall seek his converse.

  Lucian

  Sacrifice, Men, Thinking

  Lucian of Samosata (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Lucian (Illustrated)”, p.822, Delphi Classics

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• Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.

  Harriet Lerner

  Spiritual, Giving, Hearted

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• As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.

  Warren Farrell

  Taken, Past, Men

  "Why Men Are the Way They Are". Book by Warren Farrell, 1986.

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