Quotes about Listening

Avalokiteshvara means "the one who listens deeply to the sounds of the world.

When we practice in a community, there are more people to support us but also more opportunities for frustration and anger. Loving speech and deep listening are key to community building.

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.

I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.

In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.

We do not know we are full of paradise because we are so full of our own noise that we cannot hear God singing us and all things into being.

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, will never become anything, and in the end, because have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.

He is heard only when we hope to hear Him, and if, thinking our hope to be fulfilled, we cease to speak, His silence ceases to be vivid and becomes dead, even though we recharge it with the echo of our own emotional noise.

Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard.

kind of prayer we here speak of as properly "monastic" (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of "the heart.

We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen.

My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.