Many communicators try to make themselves look smart. Great listeners are more interested in making their audiences feel smart.

Listen if you want to be heard

Listen twice as much as you speak.

We are stronger when we listen, and smarter when we share.

When you're not terribly smart, it helps to be a good listener.

If you are in a place where you're more powerful than the people around you, listen as much as you talk. And if you're less powerful, talk as much as you listen, Gloria Steinem

The ability to listen is as important as the ability to speak.

When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.

Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.

The less you talk, the more you're listened to.

I believe that listening is one of the most important skills for any teacher, parent, leader, entrepreneur or, well, just about anyone who has a pulse.

How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires. And is there any other form of listening? Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby? Listening has importance only when on is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?

Learning to listen is the essence of intelligent living.

Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.