Listening quotes
1.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside listening — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream."
"When you think you're listening to several conversations at once, they tell me, you may really simply be time sharing - that is, listening a little bit to this one, a little bit to that one"
"All songs have those X factors. I couldn't even explain or describe what will grab me about them but it's all music that I'm usually listening to. I'm always looking there to hear new music and see what's going on so that's usually when I'll hear something and be like "Wow, that melody is really crazy."
"When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends."
"Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions."
"I try when I'm writing to fill my head and my ears with all sorts of stuff and then let it settle and filter through. At a certain point it seems like fruitless activity because you're taking a lot of time and not seeming to get anything. And then, slowly, you realize you've actually digested elements and that your thinking is being freed up and the way you build up compositions is changed as a result of what you've been listening to."
"No one ever lost his job by listening too much."
"Translation is not appropriation, as is sometimes claimed; it is a form of listening that then changes how you speak."
"When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated."
"The first service that one owes to others consists in listening to them."
"It's frustrating to do albums that you think are worth listening to, but it's just so difficult to cut through."
"Make a habit of dominating the listening, and let the prospect dominate the talking."
"Imagine listening to Beethoven with the prepossession that C is a good note and F a bad one; yet this is exactly the stand point from which all uninitiates contemplate the universe. Obviously, they miss the music."
"You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you."
"I started off playing the clarinet, after I was inspired by listening to my dad's Benny Goodman records."
"The Eyes are the organs of temptation, and the Ears are the organs of instruction."
"I promised myself that I'd never actually admit to listening to 'New Kids on the Block.'"
"A good concert, if you're kind of relaxed, it can do something to you. It's sort of an emotional break you get by listening to music."
"When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things."
"It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiostiy, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone."
