Listening

“ Listening, the human unit can at least say: I am not dead, I am here, I can prove it, the current of life is dancing in the delicate nerves, the brain recording, comparing, remembering—understand, I am not dead! ”

“ HEN we hear the word, but do not do it, there has been a defect in our hearing. We may listen to the word for mere entertainment. Or we may attach a virtue to the mere act of listening to the word. We may assume that some magical efficacy belongs to the mere reading of the word. ”

“ The world would listen then, as I am listening now!"
As we listen to the lark singing we look upward and see the light summer clouds driving over the blue sky. They, too, have a song which once the listening poet heard. ”

“ they are not to be communicated. I have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-bye into our lives.” ”

“ I keep up my acquaintances and pleasures and seek the society of my friends. I have not the heart to join a conversation, but leave it to be carried on by others. My fixed attention and absorbed manner of listening convey the idea that I am deeply interested in what is being said, and he who undertakes to relate anything to me is so satisfied with my style of listening that he prolongs to infinity his monologue. ”

“ What’s the use of hearing or listening to a man who does not, by the confession of his own eyes, and his own tongue, know two minutes together what he means, or mean two minutes together the same thing? ”

“ But I am thinking at this moment what it is you hope to gain by bringing me to a sense of my own iniquity in listening for an hour or two every day to the fiddling of a youth who is fresh and natural and a genius to boot. ”

“ At first and for a few minutes I felt it doubtful whether the unpleasant influence of this aggravated peculiarity would not prevent his words of exhortation from having salutary effect upon the minds of the listening assembly. But as his words seemed to flow and warm with increasing unction, little by little they cleared up from that nasal cadence and rounded into more oral enunciation. Little by little they strengthened with the power of truth, and the truth made them free and flowing. ”

“ Who has not known what it is to sit lost in sad or delicious meditation, listening to its voice within, while attending to a conversation or to reading? An admirable duality which often helps us to tolerate a bore! ”

“ The mood of the moment, the especial weight of a turn of thought, the desire of the speaker to share his exact soul-concept with you,—these seek far more subtle means than the mere rendering of certain vocal signs; they demand such variations and delicate adjustments of sound as will inevitably affect the listening mind with the response desired. ”

“ Have you ever heard any one read aloud in an even tone of voice, without changing the pitch or giving what is called expression to the story? You soon grow tired of listening to such reading even though the words are distinctly spoken. ”

“ His ears he opened only to discourse which tended to good, for it gave him pain to hear news and worldly talk, and he made every effort to avoid listening to what would delight the hearing without profit to the soul. ”

“ The facts about the way people listen, about the way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls, switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all around one as one goes out of the hall. ”

“ I’m ready to talk, walk, laugh, sing, dance, tell incomparably bawdy stories, and, what is after all the most valuable return of all, I’m ready to sit perfectly still and let myself be bored to death while giving him an idea that I’m listening intelligently. ”

“ On listening carefully to the talk going on around us, we may observe that it does not run in an unchanged monotone, but that all sentences are intoned to an imperfect tune, a rise and fall of pitch marking the phrases, distinguishing question and answer, and touching emphatic words with a musical accent. ”

“ The understanding of words heard is announced especially by the first listening, by the association of certain movements with certain sound-impressions, and of motionless objects with other sound-impressions, before speaking begins. ”

“ It expects rather to record a continually perfected machinery, a life in which not only speech but ideas are brought into rule. We have had something to say occasionally of the art of conversation, which is in danger of being lost in the confused babel of the reception and the chatter of the dinner-party—the art of listening and the art of talking both being lost. ”

“ To good listening is due a great part of the noble thought, the golden instruction, and the brilliant wit which has elevated, enlightened, and brightened the soul of man. There are fine minds whose workings are never expressed in writing ”

“ Antonyms: LISTEN. Synonyms:
Between listen and hear is a difference like that between the words look and see. (Compare synonyms for LOOK.) To hear is [233] simply to become conscious of sound, to listen is to make a conscious effort or endeavor to hear. We may hear without listening, as words suddenly uttered in an adjoining room; or we may listen without hearing, as to a distant speaker. In listening the ear is intent upon the sound; in attending the mind is intent upon the thought, tho listening implies some attention to the meaning or import of the sound. ”

“ We pay attention by watching the eyes, facial expressions, and behavior of people, by listening for the question behind the question and for the meaning behind the meaning, remembering that there is tremendous content behind what is said and shown. If we would be servants of love, we must have ears that really hear and eyes that really see ”

“ In listening attentively, only the brain and ears are needed; but watch the individuals at an entertaining lecture, or in church with a stirring preacher. They are listening with their spines, their shoulders, the muscles of their faces. I do not refer to the look of interest and attention, or to any of the various expressions which are the natural and true reflection of the state of the mind, but to the strained attention which draws the facial muscles, not at all in sympathy with the speaker, but as a consequence of the tense nerves and contracted muscles of the listener. ”

“ If I am intently listening for a particular sound and hear another, I may interpret it for the one I was expecting; if I am intently gazing in expectation of seeing one object, and another falls upon the field of vision, I may see in it the one for which I was intently gazing. ”

“ And above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them. ”

“ The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state. ”

“ but left so pleasing on their ear His voice, that listening still they seem’d to hear. ”

“ Next after sight, hearing is our most important sense; without it, speaking, and consequently reading and writing, would be impossible. Man learned to speak by hearing the sounds made by other people and things, and then by listening to his own voice and practicing until he could imitate them. ”

“ Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. ”

“ The phenomena of conversations, to which we appear to ourselves to be listening during sleep, or in which we appear to ourselves to be taking part, are, when analyzed, most remarkable occurrences, for it is the mind of the sleeper which originates the whole of what appears to be said by different persons. ”

“ Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. ”

“ She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting in other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked round her. ”

“ Having gained his hearing, will he condescend to moderate his views and listen to a little wisdom from older and more experienced men; or will he be obtuse enough to continue to stamp and shout on his tub, for fear people will call him a turncoat, or a few, who really do not matter, will leave off listening to him if he grows less noisy? ”

“ One can pick it up in the hearing of an inarticulate sound, or listening to an unintelligible remark, or in the observation of a flower blooming, or in the encountering of any trivial everyday incident such as stumbling, rolling up a screen, using a fan, etc. These are all sufficient conditions that will awaken one’s inner sense. ”

“ And hear how in all places He revealeth not all off-hand, but first throweth the hearer into perplexity, in order that having begun to seek the meaning of what has been said, and then being perplexed and in difficulty, he may when what he sought appears, receive it the more readily, and be made more attentive to listening. ”

“ ⁠Teach me half the gladness
⁠That thy brain must know,
⁠Such harmonious madness
⁠From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now. ”

“ 10but this I think everyone would admit, that the man who is going to listen to the philosophers needs at least a certain amount of practice in listening. ”

“ We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. ”

“ Articulate and written words, the signs of ideas, being conventional, we can apply them justly only so far as we have received the impression associated with the ideas they represent, only so far as they are made familiar by the habit of reading and listening. In other words, the double talent of understanding the written and spoken foreign language conduces respectively to the arts of writing and speaking. ”

“ I like looking at geniuses, and listening to beautiful people. ”

“ Though overflowing with thought, which streams from his brain as from a capacious reservoir while his words ‘trip around as airy servitors,’ he is one of the best of listeners, never assuming an undue share of the talk, and lending an attentive and patient ear to the common currency of conversation, without demanding of men the language of the gods. ”

“ Instead they hear in their mind’s ear the sound of dishes, the murmur of conversation, and the clatter of knives and forks. When they have learned their lessons, and stand up to recite, they hear an inner voice telling them what to say. ”

“ HEARING, natural, is grounded in spiritual hearing, which is attention of the understanding, and at the same time accommodation of the will, 220. The love of hearing grounded in the love of hearkening to and obeying has the sense of hearing, and the gratifications proper to it are the various kinds of harmony, 210. The perception of a thing imbibed by hearing only flows in indeed, but does not remain unless the hearer also thinks of it from himself, and asks questions concerning it, 183. ”

“ We should not underestimate the value of meditation and silence to the public speaker. These are necessary for original and profound thinking, for the cultivation of the imagination, and for the accumulation of thought. But conversation offers an immediate outlet for this stored-up knowledge, testing it as a finished product in expression, and projecting it into life and reality by all the resources of voice and feeling. This exercise is as necessary to the mind as physical exercise is to the body. ”

“ Granting, then, that to have something to say which is worth hearing is the substance of good conversation, we must reckon among its accidents and ornaments a manner which knows how to be easy and free without being free-and-easy; a habitual deference to the tastes and even the prejudices of other people; a hearty desire to be, or at least to seem, interested in their concerns; and a constant recollection that even the most patient hearers may sometimes wish to be speakers. ”

“ There must be occasionally an animated and intelligent response, intervals of attentive and patient hearing, with a succession of questions, earnestly, but modestly put, and arising naturally out of the subject, to render the part of the listener of any value in general conversation. ”

“ But by-and-by someone comes with quiet voice, who without pretence speaks of the "soul" and uses familiar words, and the listeners drink deep, and pay the applause of silence and long remembrance and sustained after-endeavor. ”

“ Contrary to the opinions of some writers, I find hearing, and not the group of tactual-motor sensations, to be the chief sense with the blind, both in waking and in dreams. That hearing owes very much of this supremacy to its being the vehicle of conversation, goes without saying. ”