A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

This line is from Paul Simon’s song “The Boxer,” recorded by Simon & Garfunkel during the late 1960s and released in 1969. The song is framed as a first-person narrative of hardship, disillusionment, and perseverance, moving through scenes of loneliness, poverty, and emotional bruising. The quoted line appears early, in a verse that reflects on how people filter experience through desire and self-protection—an idea that fits the song’s broader portrait of a speaker trying to make sense of rejection and struggle. As a lyric, it also resonates with the era’s introspective singer-songwriter style, where psychological insight is embedded in plainspoken storytelling.

The sentence captures selective perception: people often accept information that confirms what they already hope or believe and ignore what threatens those beliefs. In “The Boxer,” this functions as both a general observation about human nature and a defense mechanism for the narrator—an explanation for why comforting narratives can persist even when reality is harsh. The line’s power lies in its simplicity: it suggests that “hearing” is not passive reception but an active, biased process shaped by need, fear, and identity. More broadly, it points to the emotional logic behind denial and confirmation bias, showing how self-deception can be a form of survival as well as a barrier to truth.

“A man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest.”