Listening Quotes

“Pop music means everything to me. I've been listening to pop since I was kid, running home from school to watch Britney Spears and Spice Girls and Christina Aguilera music videos, and it felt like it was a world to escape to for me personally.”

“But this payment goes well beyond my generosity," the monk responded."Don’t say that again. Life might be listening, and give you less the next time.”

“I look like I'm not listening, but I'm actually listening. I like listening to everything, observing everybody, just taking everything in, and then, in my mind, figuring out what's good for me and what's bad for me.”

“I feel that I had been rescued from the gutter by America. One day I was under the gutter, chased by police, thinking dogs were going to get me. I laid there listening to the dogs and the gutter. The next day, there I am standing on the Olympic platform, and you hear the anthem. I was proud.”

“We all need songs that bring out our inner swagger just listening to it.”

“He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.”

“I realized I was more convincing to myself and to the people who were listening when I actually said what I thought, versus what I thought people wanted to hear me say.”

“When I am listening to Vivaldi or Japanese music or making spaghetti at 3 in the morning and realize that I don't have the proper sauce for it, fame is of no use.”

“When you've got hardly any equipment, very little money and no access to any information, your sound is very much dictated by you, your setup and what you're listening to. Nothing more.”

“Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.”

“During my sabbatical, I spent two years not listening to my songs at all.”

“One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

“You ought to stop listening to stereotypes and start forming your own opinions.”

“The whole '400 Degreez' album was inspired by what Outkast was doing, Organized Noize. That was what I was listening to around that time.”

“I love to sing. I never had any formal training. My mother is a singer, and I picked up listening to her.”

“Social media listening tools make it easy to track brand references and mentions, and these functions can still be handled ably by a small, dedicated team.”

“When I first started writing music, it was all really angry, angst-y lyrics. But then there was a point where I realized that people are clearly listening to what I have to say, so if I have the power to bring somebody up, why would I bring them down?”

“To me, country music is like the blues, but it's something very hip and - I don't want to say commercial - but it's very worldly and good listening.”

“Most of the music I grew up listening to was not Christian music, although I definitely had a lot of that at home, too.”