Listen Up

Sunday, March 14, 2010 – Listen Up

No man ever listened himself out of a job. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Listening to both sides does not necessarily bring about a correct judgment. ~ Donald Rumsfeld

I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m listening to it. ~ George Carlin

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. ~ James A. Baldwin

Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening. ~ Dorothy Sarnoff

The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk. ~ Doug Larson

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. ~ Milan Kundera

If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. ~ Alice Cooper

Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages. ~ Barry Goldwater

Teens think listening to music helps them concentrate. It doesn’t. It relieves them of the boredom that concentration on homework induces. ~ Marilyn vos Savant

I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it’s so petty. ~ Imelda Marcos

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody’s listening. ~ Franklin P. Jones

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender. ~ Brian Eno

If you listen to really deep ambient records that don’t move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room. ~ Bill Laswell

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also. ~ Igor Stravinsky

Reading music is like listening to flowers. I don’t understand the concept. ~ Paul Westerberg

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream. ~ Joan Didion

Listening to people keeps them entertained. ~ Mason Cooley

You can’t fake listening. It shows. ~ Raquel Welch

For an actress there is no greater gift than having a camera in front of you, listening to the most beautiful music in the world and just being looked at! ~ Isabelle Huppert

There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep. ~ Meg Greenfield

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk. ~ Doug Larson

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence. ~ Edith Sitwell

Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. ~ Marcelene Cox

People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back. ~ Alistair Cooke

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. ~ Winston Churchill

Women like silent men. They think they’re listening. ~ Marcel Achard

You seldom listen to me, and when you do you don’t hear, and when you do hear you hear wrong, and even when you hear right you change it so fast that it’s never the same. ~ Marjorie Kellogg

I would be willing to bet that if one day a woman walked barefoot to the moon and back and a man cleaned out his desk, when the two of them sat down to dinner that night he would say, “Boy was that desk a mess.” ~ Margo Kaufman

I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying. ~ Charles C. Finn

Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering. ~ Winnie the Pooh

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something. ~ Wilson Mizner

No man would listen to you talk if he didn’t know it was his turn next. ~ Edgar Watson Howe

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. ~ Henry David Thoreau.

A good listener is not someone with nothing to say. A good listener is a good talker with a sore throat. ~ Katharine Whitehorn

To be listened to is, generally speaking, a nearly unique experience for most people. It is enormously stimulating. It is small wonder that people who have been demanding all their lives to be heard so often fall speechless when confronted with one who gravely agrees to lend an ear. Man clamors for the freedom to express himself and for knowing that he counts. But once offered these conditions, he becomes frigthened. ~ Robert C. Murphy

Everybody lies, but it doesn’t matter because nobody listens. ~ Nick Diamos

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966