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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Listening

It takes a great man to make a good listener.

Sir Arthur Helps.

Take care what you say before a wall, as you cannot tell who may be behind it.

Saadi.

Nature has given to men one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.

Epictetus.

And this cuff was but to knock at your ear, and beseech listening.

Shakespeare.

  • He ceas’d; but left so pleasing on their ear
  • His voice, that list’ning still they seem’d to hear.
  • Homer.

    Were we as eloquent as angels, yet should we please some men and some women much more by listening than by talking.

    Colton.

    “Take heed how ye hear” is a genuine monition touching happy relations—a real injunction under the law of love. Let us not think it applies only to the way we hear sermons. How do you listen to the conversation of your friends? With half-parted lips ready to break in with your own opinions? With the wandering eye of one evidently uninterested? Is this the love that helps another to be his best? Do you like to be well listened to? Mind, then, the give and take of love, and be a good listener, and for truth’s sake as well as love’s.

    Maltbie Babcock.