National Day of Listening: Lend your ear to quotes about listening skills

Photo: www.sxc.hu/profile/StillSearc

For shoppers, tomorrow is the mother of all holidays. But tomorrow is not just Black Friday, it’s also a day that you may not have even heard of. In order to promote communication and storytelling, StoryCorps made Friday, November 27 the National Day of Listening. People are encouraged to record an interview with a loved one and save it for others to enjoy and share. The importance of nonverbal communication cannot be overstated—in fact, interpersonal communication experts believe that the majority of our communication does not take place with our words. Part of this includes listening skills—the topic of today’s quotes—which are important to keep any relationship healthy.

1. “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
–Franz Kafka

2. "Go right on and listen as thou goest."
–Dante Alighieri

3. “Whoever obeys the gods, to him they particularly listen.”
–Homer

4. “Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.”
–Oscar Wilde

5. “I'll not listen to reason...reason always means what someone else has got to say.”
–Elizabeth Gaskell

6. “We doctors know
a hopeless case if—listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go.”
–E.E. Cummings

7. “[On the nightingale] Lord Zeus, listen to the little bird's voice; he has filled the whole thicket with honeyed song.”
–Aristophanes

8. “Why does the muse only speak when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy.”
–Stevie Smith

9. "With your whole body, with your whole heart, with your whole conscience, listen to the Revolution....This is the music everyone who has ears should hear."
–Alexander Blok

10. “It is wise to listen, not to me but to the Word, and to confess that all things are one.”
–Heraclitus

11. “Bore, n.: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.”
–Ambrose Bierce

12. “All the problems of the world are caused by people who do not listen.”
–Franco Zeffirelli

13. “It takes a great man to make a good listener.”
–Sir Arthur Helps

14. "The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.”
–Alan Alda

Sources:

Bartlett, John. (2002). Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature. Little, Brown and Company.

Venstra, Elizabeth. (2008). True Genius: 1001 Quotes That Will Change Your Life. Skyhorse Publishing.

Related Reading:
Good Grief! 15 quotes from 'A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving'
7 interpersonal relationship lessons from 'A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving'
7 workplace lessons from 'A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving'
Praising God: 20 Bible quotes for Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving quotes about gratitude
Talking turkey: 20 food quotes for Thanksgiving
Funny quotes about Thanksgiving
How to make every day Thanksgiving in the workplace
Shop till you drop! Money quotes for Black Friday.

More Quotations:
Is Sarah Palin a TWILF? Al Gore's Current TV coins a new term.
Have a Bad Day Day: Quotes about insults
15 not-so-smooth quotes from criminals
Celebrate 'The Twilight Saga: New Moon' with quotes about vampires
Celebrate Cat Days with cute quotes about our feline friends

Other Interesting Reading:
Disenfranchised grief: What 9/11 means to me...now
The dark side of interpersonal relationships
Office romance gone wrong: Brooke Hundley speaks out about affair with Steve Phillips
The workplace communication of the ad men on 'Mad Men'
I bedded my boss: Stories of sex in the workplace

Subscribe via RSS or e-mail.