Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.

Unless you listen, people are weazened in your presence; they become about a third of themselves. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.

If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.

We should all know this: that listening is not talking; [it] is the gifted and great role and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective, and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.

The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good

we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.