This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right.
The magic of listening brings us closer to the central core of the universe. To begin to comprehend the mystery of life it is not sufficient to touch and to see – we need to hear, to listen, and thus to unite heart and mind and soul. The softer the sound the more important it is that we perceive it. We have, I fear, become a deaf people, and the cries of pain of the flora and fauna around us, the very air we breathe, the suffering of our fellow human beings in our urban deserts, in parts of the globe we have subjected to war, to famine and flood through greed and selfishness, have become inaudible. The media encourages us to read, to view, to hear, but that does not mean we listen. Until we can create a still center within ourselves we will be unable to attune the “third ear” to the messages that are broadcast to us, loud and clear for the most part, but rendered futile due to our incapacity to listen.
Greed | Heart | Important | Life | Life | Listening | Magic | Mind | Mystery | Need | Pain | Sound | Suffering | Will |
Great communication depends on two simple skills—context, which attunes a leader to the same frequency as his or her audience, and delivery, which allows a leader to phrase messages in a language the audience can understand. Earn the right to be heard by listening to others. Seek to understand a situation before making judgments about it. Take the emotional temperature of those listening to you. Facial expressions, voice inflection and posture give clues to a person’s mood and attitude. Persuasive communication involves enthusiasm, animation, audience participation, authenticity and spontaneity.
Authenticity | Language | Listening | Right | Leader | Understand |
The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.
Life | Life | Listening | Love | Majority | People | Power | Time | Unique | Waiting | Will |
Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you.
Life | Life | Listening | Problems | Self | Talking | Unhappiness |
Let us read the Bible without the ill-fitting colored spectacles of theology, just as we read other books, using our own judgment and reason, listening to the voice within, not to the noisy babel without. Most of us possess discriminating reasoning powers. Can we use them or must we be fed by others like babes?
There are many benefits to this process of listening. The first is that good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.
Education is a natural process carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment.
And so we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher’s task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.
Education | Listening | Motives | Virtue | Virtue | Child | Teacher |
Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words but by experiences in the environment.
People are watching the way we act more than they are listening to what we say.
You want to make a difference in your world? Live a holy life: Be faithful to your spouse. Be the one at the office who refuses to cheat. Be the neighbor who acts neighborly. Be the employee who does the work and doesn’t complain. Pay your bills. Do your part and enjoy life. Don’t speak one message and live another. People are watching the way we act more than they are listening to what we say.
There are no longer any silent men in the world today; there is no longer even any difference between the silent and the speaking man, only between the speaking and the non-speaking man. And because there are no silent men there are also no longer any listeners. Man today is incapable of listening; and because he is incapable of listening he can no longer tell a story, for listening and true story-telling belong together: they are a unity.
Men shout to avoid listening to one another.
Mom, you’re not listening. / Sweetie, yes I am. / You’re not listening with your eyes.
The hearer of myth, regardless of his level of culture, when he is listening to a myth, forgets, as it were, his particular situation and is projected into another world, into another universe which is no longer his poor little universe of every day. . . . The myths are true because they are sacred, because they tell him about sacred beings and events. Consequently, in reciting or listening to a myth, one resumes contact with the sacred and with reality, and in so doing one transcends the profane condition, the "historical situation." In other words one goes beyond the temporal condition and the dull self-sufficiency which is the lot of every human being simply because every human being is "ignorant" — in the sense that he is identifying himself, and Reality, with his own particular situation. And ignorance is, first of all, this false identification of Reality with what each one of us appears to be or to possess.
Ignorance | Listening | Little | Reality | Sacred | Self-sufficiency | Sense | Universe | Words |
Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.
There are many doors to goodness. (Saying) ‘glory to God,’ ‘praise be to God,’ ‘there is no deity but God,’ enjoining good, forbidding evil, removing harm from the road, listening to the deaf (until you understand them), leading the blind, guiding one to the object of his need, hurrying with the strength of one’s legs to one in sorrow who is asking for help, and supporting the weak with the strength of one’s arms – all of these are (forms of) charity prescribed for you.
Charity | Harm | Listening | Object | Sorrow | Strength | Understand |