The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.

Ralph Nichols

"Something I wish I could teach parents is to listen to kids rather than ignore or say 'That's nice.' Instead, listen, really listen, to what children have to say."

-- Holly, age 12 (found at the National PTA's Family Room at

"Remember, you can listen a person's soul into existence."

-- Sign over a campus crisis hotline

"When you've learned how to Listen, well that's when you've learned everything you need to know in your life!"

-- Glynn David Harris
International Listening Association's 1999
Listener of the Year

"To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind’s hearing to your ears’ natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning."

- Peter Senge

"One of the most valuable things we can do to heal one another is listen to each other's stories." 

--Rebecca Falls

"To talk to someone who does not listen is enough to tense the devil."

-- Pearl Bailey

"Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us."

-- Alice Duer Miller (1874 - 1942) US poet, author

"Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer."

- Dalai Lama, 2001

"Listening looks easy, but it's not simple. Every head is a world."

-- Cuban Proverb

"Praise does wonders for our sense of hearing."

-- Arnold Glasgow