October 25, 2026

Listen Before You Speak

Para dialogar, preguntad, primero; después... escuchad.

Antonio Machado spent most of his working life as a provincial schoolteacher in Castile, teaching French to restless teenagers by day and writing spare, proverb-like poems by night. This line comes from his 1924 collection Nuevas canciones, where he compressed decades of classroom and café conversation into short sayings meant to be carried around, not admired from a distance. He is saying that a real question is an invitation to someone else's thinking, not a setup for your own. Spoken plainly: to talk with someone, ask first, then listen — the listening is the actual conversation.