Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Interpretation
Listening fosters connection and growth in relationships.
In this quote, Karl A. Menninger emphasizes the profound impact of listening on interpersonal relationships. He suggests that those who take the time to truly listen to our thoughts and feelings create a magnetic bond with us, encouraging our personal development and expansion as individuals. Effective listening is not just about hearing words but engaging with the emotions and ideas behind them, which strengthens friendships and enhances our sense of self.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a team building workshop to highlight the importance of active listening.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
What's done to children, they will do to society.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.
Looking back, I am grateful for so many friends who helped me in my youth to gain a testimony of the restored Church of Jesus Christ. First, I exercised simple faith in their testimonies, and then I received the divine witness of the Spirit to my mind and to my heart.
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
I can do much, I can do everything for a man who will be my friend. I can give him power; I can give him wealth. I can give him reputation - the power, the wealth, the reputation which come to a man who speaks to a million people a day in the columns of a great paper.
I've been an important star and lived a full life, yet I only hve three close friends. I guess that's all anyone can expect.
Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.
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