Hearing: Quotes

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. – Anne Sexton

Read with your ears. – Gerald Manley Hopkins

When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields.  The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked.  The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs. – Eudora Welty

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak.  I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence…. – Pablo Neruda

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listed to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius.  When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. – Karl Menninger

Silence is more musical than any song. – Christina Rossetti

Trees are sanctuaries.  Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.  They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. – Hermann Hesse

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. – Aldos Huxley

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. – Berthold Auerbach

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. – Minnie Aumonier