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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"You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [...] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'."
"Whether you're with a group of people, whether you're playing music or whether you're by yourself, even if it's written material, you have to be listening."
"If I'm improvising and I'm not doing well it's because I'm not listening very well. Either I'm overly concerned with something or I'm drifting or maybe I'm too stoned but I'm not getting a clear signal."
"How can you have any regret when everything worked out fine? But why I think it worked out fine is due to the lessons I learned along the way. And one of those involves listening to experts."
"I'm a child of the 80s so I grew up listening to an awesome variety of music. John Cougar Mellencamp, Tom Petty. I've always loved Elvis Presley and Kenny Rogers. Beastie Boys made me start making music."
"For any budding cricketers listening, do you have any superstitious routines before an innings, like putting one pad on first and then the other one?"
"I don't really like listening to the radio so much."
"You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone."
"As for the influence on my writing,music has definitely influenced how I write. That idea of cadence, repetition, all those elements appear throughout my writing. Drumming has definitely had a huge influence on the way I write, too. Has definitely tuned my ear to rhythm. After I've written something, I'll go through it repeatedly, carefully listening to the construction of the words, seeing, hearing how they flow."
"Live among others as if God beheld you; speak to God as if others were listening."
"Several Southeastern tribes have long said that their ancestors received immigrants from Mesoamerica and that these immigrants introduced many cultural changes. Far too few anthropologists were listening."
"For one who is having no personal experience, the passionate disquiet of others is at any rate a titillation of the nerves, like seeing a play or listening to music."
"We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information - all in short (and loud) doses of "easy listening"."
"Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face."
"When I first started listening to music intently as a teenager, I was always sitting there with a biro or a pencil, drawing. That's how I absorbed it all."
"Like trillions of others, if it wasn't for Bob Dylan, it would have been a different musical landscape. Pop music wouldn't have been my thing at all. I did also grow up listening to The Beatles, but I never thought of being a Beatle."
"I was nostalgic even as a young man. Preferred listening to Opera not Bing Crossby."
"I didn't really see the British punk movement, if that's what it was, as wildly original, because I had been listening so intently to all the New York music since 1973, really."
"Studying entrepreneurshi p without doing it... is like studying the appreciation of music without listening to it."
"He lay face down, listening to the silence. He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself."
