This post contains some of the best quotes on not listening.
Quotes On Not Listening
1. “While you might think you’d be more likely to listen to a loved one than a stranger, in fact, the opposite is often true.” – Kate Murphy
2. “The only certainty you achieve by not listening to people is that you will be bored and you will be boring because you won’t learn anything new” – Kate Murphy
3. “Listening may indeed and probably will help you accomplish your goals, but if that’s your only motivation for listening, then you are just making a show of it. People will pick up on your inauthenticity.” – Kate Murphy
4. “It’s the missed opportunity to connect when you weren’t listening or someone wasn’t really listening to you.” – Kate Murphy
5. “Our culture makes it hard for people to listen even in the best of circumstances. But it’s even tougher for participants in some of these programs, many of whom experienced abuse or neglect when they were growing up.” – Kate Murphy
Related: Emotionally Unavailable Husband Quiz
6. “People can change how they are in relationships when they learn to listen and be emotionally responsive to others.” – Kate Murphy
7. “It’s really hard to listen if you have a disorganized attachment style because intimacy can feel scary or frightening.” – Kate Murphy
8. “An insecure avoidant attachment style comes from growing up with caregivers who were mostly inattentive—or perhaps overly attentive, to the point of smothering. People raised this way are often bad listeners because they tend to shut down or leave relationships whenever things get too close.” – Kate Murphy
9. “The sad truth is people have more experience with what makes them feel ignored or misunderstood than what makes them feel gratifyingly heard.” – Kate Murphy
10. “If you’re like most people, you get aggravated when people don’t listen to you, and worse when they condescend to listen to you.” – Kate Murphy
Related: Feeling Invisible? 3 Steps To Stop Feeling Invisible and Be Seen
11. “You’ve probably had experiences with people who made a show of listening. Maybe they went through the motions, nodding earnestly with knitted brows, but there was a strange vacancy behind their eyes, and the nods did not correspond with anything in particular that you said. They might have responded generically (“Uh-huh” or “I hear you”) but conveyed no real understanding of the points you’d made. It likely felt patronizing— and you might have even wanted to punch them in the face.” – Kate Murphy
12. “Again, this is not to say that poor listeners are necessarily bad or boorish people. When they finish your sentences for you, they truly believe that they are being helpful. They may interrupt because they thought of something that you would really want to know or they thought of a joke that was too funny to wait.” – Kate Murphy
13. ““I’m a better listener than most people,” said a trial lawyer in Houston returning my call in his car during rush-hour traffic. “Wait, hold on a second, I have another call.”” – Kate Murphy
14. “It was extraordinary how many people told me they considered it burdensome to ask family or friends to listen to them—not just about their problems but about anything more meaningful than the usual social niceties or jokey banter.” – Kate Murphy
Related: Self-Abandonment: What Is It & How To Get Back In Touch With Yourself
15. ““Who listens to you?” Almost without exception, what followed was a pause. Hesitation. The lucky ones could come up with one or two people, usually a spouse or maybe a parent, best friend, or sibling. But many said, if they were honest, they didn’t feel like they had anyone who truly listened to them, even those who were married or claimed a vast network of friends and colleagues.” – Kate Murphy
16. “And certainly the virtues of listening are not reinforced by the media or in popular culture. News and Sunday talk shows are more often shouting matches or exercises in “gotcha” than respectful forums for exploring disparate views.” – Kate Murphy
17. “Bad listeners are not necessarily bad people. You likely have a dear friend, family member, or maybe a romantic partner who is a terrible listener. Perhaps you, yourself, are not the best listener. And you could be forgiven since, in many ways, you’ve been conditioned not to listen” – Kate Murphy
Related: How To Heal Abandonment Issues? Top 15 Powerful Strategies For Fear of Abandonment Healing
18. “People get lonely for lack of listening. Psychology and sociology researchers have begun warning of an epidemic of loneliness in the United States.” – Kate Murphy
19. “The ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.” – Kate Murphy
20. “People used to listen to one another while sitting on front porches and around campfires, but now we are too busy, or too distracted, to explore the depths of one another’s thoughts and feelings.” – Kate Murphy
21. “And to listen poorly, selectively, or not at all is to limit your understanding of the world and deprive yourself of becoming the best you can be.” – Kate Murphy
22.“Toxic positivity has officially entered the building. You freeze and think, Are they even listening to me? Am I seriously supposed to be grateful that I just lost my job?” – Whitney Goodman
Related: Do’s And Don’ts Of Effective Communication
23. “Some people won’t be able to support you when you need a listening ear. That doesn’t mean that you’re being too much or should stop sharing. Find your people.” – Whitney Goodman
25. “Wars have been fought, fortunes lost, and friendships wrecked for lack of listening.” – Kate Murphy
26. “If people are listening to anything, it’s likely through headphones or earbuds, where they are safe inside their own curated sound bubbles; the soundtracks to the movies that are their walled-off lives.” – Kate Murphy
27. “Who needs to listen to people when you can just Google them? A Facebook page, Instagram feed, or LinkedIn profile, the thinking goes, tells you all you need to know.” – Kate Murphy
28. “Our listening suffers from broadly applied and collective ideas of identity, which discourages discovery of what makes us and other people unique.” – Kate Murphy
29. “So it doesn’t matter how long you have known or how well you think you know people; if you stop listening, you will eventually lose your grasp of who they are and how to relate to them.” – Kate Murphy
30. “People in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Not necessarily in an unkind way; they just become convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say.” – Kate Murphy
Related: How To Validate Someone’s Feelings Without Agreeing? (+Examples of Validating Statements)
