Brenda Ueland Quotes About Listening
-
We should all know this: that listening is not talking; [it] is the gifted and great role and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective, and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.
→ -
And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good
→ -
The only way to love a person is...by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.
→ -
We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.
→ -
Unless you listen, people are weazened in your presence; they become about a third of themselves. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.
→ -
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
→ -
When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
→ -
Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.
→ -
We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day.
→ -
I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force...When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
→ -
Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.
→ -
You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.
→
Related Authors
-
Eric Maisel Teacher -
Samuel Ullman Poet -
William Zinsser Writer -
Jack Bickham Author -
Stewart Udall American Politician -
Mo Udall Former U.S. Representative -
Carolyn See Professor -
Jim Krusoe Novelist -
Francine Prose Writer -
Natalie Goldberg Author -
John Churton Collins Literary critic -
Fridtjof Nansen Explorer -
Ralph Keyes Author -
Julia Cameron Teacher -
Robert McKee Author -
Libby Larsen Composer -
-
Genevieve Behrend Author -
Dorothea Brande Writer -
Annie Dillard Author