William Stringfellow Quotes
Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are preoccupied with your appearance, or with impressing the other, or are trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops talking, or are debating about whether what is being said is true or relevant or agreeable.
Such matters have their place, but only after listening to the word as the word is being uttered.
Listening is a primitive act of love in which a person gives himself to another’s word, making himself accessible and vulnerable to that word.
William Stringfellow
Quotes to Explore
People hear the examples of kids who work when they're young, have bad experiences, and then have a rough life after that, but a lot of it is just about the people around you.
Haley Joel Osment
I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
Salvador Dali
I'm a serious eater and a seriously hungry person, so I set out on that path to figure it out for myself, and of course it really resonated with other people.
Sally Schneider
The Greek city-states politicised citizen and subject, creating institutions that were way ahead of anything in China or India. The politicians of antiquity exercised a political and military, if not economic, hegemony on the culture as a whole. The idea of democracy was first born and practised here.
Tariq Ali
To a mind like mine, restless, inquisitive, and observant of everything that was passing, it is easy to suppose that religion was the subject to which it would be directed; and, although this subject principally occupied my thoughts, there was nothing that I saw or heard of to which my attention was not directed.
Nat Turner
There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind - my conscious, inner self - was alive and well.
Eben Alexander
When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.
Chinua Achebe
I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.
David Lindsay-Abaire
There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. At one point he took the robes he was wearing and just started flipping them up in the air, out of nowhere. And later, an actor said to him, "What was that, George, what were you doing?" And he said, "They were sleeping." You're always trying to catch them.
Al Pacino
To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I try to get on stage whenever I can. I'm always trying to be involved in the theater, doing something on stage, whenever I have downtime. I'm always looking for it.
Scott Bakula
Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are preoccupied with your appearance, or with impressing the other, or are trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops talking, or are debating about whether what is being said is true or relevant or agreeable.
Such matters have their place, but only after listening to the word as the word is being uttered.
Listening is a primitive act of love in which a person gives himself to another’s word, making himself accessible and vulnerable to that word.
William Stringfellow
