Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.

If you'd just learn to do as I say from the beginning, I wouldn't have to follow up your errors with reproving smirks and repeated 'I told you so's'.

Never take advice about never taking advice. That is an old vice of men - to dish it out without being able to take it - the blind leading the blind into more blindness.

In the past, I have all too often listened without hearing, asking questions when I had no intention of hearing the answer or understand my customer’s requirements.

When you start listening to side talks, you begin to behave like a child, and you must kill the child to sustain the man, the man is always overlooking and philosophical.

I heard everything you said, listened to half, and agreed with a quarter. And 12.5% isn’t bad—if you’re collecting that in interest on money you lent out.

Your silence creates a vacuum for others to fill The key is to stay present and keep listening. The silence of holding steady is different from the silence of holding back.

In my experience when a friend unloaded about a boyfriend or spouse, the listener soaked up the complaint and remembered it long after the speaker had forgiven the offense.

I have no auditory depth perception. She said, “I love you,” and I couldn’t even tell if she was 300 miles away, or 6 feet below my feet and 300 years away.

I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.

To me, a good friend is one who doesn't talk, but who listens all the time. Someone who is observant. Someone who wiretaps your phone lines. I consider myself a good friend.

For most of my life I've been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me.

Bloom with hope! Breathe in with hope in your soul. Thrive on with endurance in your heart. Move on with a productive mind. Listen carefully to the soft message of whispering hope.

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.

I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.