Brenda Ueland famous quotes

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Important

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Creativity #Long #Six

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Tired #People #Creative

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Imagination #Creative

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Generosity #Performances

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #People #Feelings

Why should we all use our creative power....? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Fighting #Compassion #People

It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one's mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Letting Go #Mistake #Conceited

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Inspirational #Incomparable

In true courage there is always an element of choice, of an ethical choice, and of anguish, and also of action and deed. There is always a flame of spirit in it, a vision of some necessity higher than oneself.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Flames #Choices #Vision

We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Life #Want #Serious

The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Trying #Way

It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Creativity #Streams

If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign. It means that your vision can see so far that it's hard to come up to it. Again I say - the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Ocean #Writing #Mean

Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Nice #Love You #Mean

We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Reading #Talking #Listening

the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Way #Better Person

All children have creative power.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Children #Creative

Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Inspiration #Solitude #Littles

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Ideas #Grows

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Talent #Humans

I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Inspiration #Creativity #Creating

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #Self #Speak

The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Happiness #Long #Imagination

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Love You #Talking #Three

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Children #Writing #Creativity

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Peace #Artist #People

Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Self Esteem #Self #Trying

... when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. ... Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other because their two legs are tied together.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #Race #Two

You must become aware of the richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there, so that you can write opulently and with self-trust. If you once become aware of it and have faith in it, you will be all right.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Believe #Writing #Self

... the spirit, I think, is a stream, a fountain, and must be continually poured out, for only if it is poured out will more and clearer streams come.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #Spirit #Fountain

If you write something and they all tell you it is bad - editors, critics, everybody - think it over and you may become convinced that they are right (though you are not to be ashamed or discouraged for a minute, but keep on writing).
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Thinking #Editors

everyone who is human has something to express. Try not expressing yourself for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter, or draw a picture, or sing, or make a dress or a garden.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Communication #Writing #Garden

These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: "I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget." But they have no slow, big ideas.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Cutting #Ideas #People

If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Ideas #Long

You do not know what is in you - an inexhaustible fountain of ideas.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Ideas #Fountain

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #People #Tragedy

vivisection is not the same thing as scientific progress. There is such a thing as scientific progress. But this wholesale dedication of scientists to vivisection, which is the easy and cheap way, actually prevents them from scientific progress, for true progress is difficult and requires genius and imagination in its devoted workers.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Animal #Dedication #Imagination

Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #Two #Sometimes

running is the right thing to do! I am free, healthy with a good complexion. It is that automobile addict who should be ashamed: driving in a sealed car in warmed-over carbon monoxide and smoking a seegar. I am the Goddess! He is a bug in a monkey nut!
-- Brenda Ueland

#Fitness #Running #Nuts

The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining,
-- Brenda Ueland

#Life Changing #Moving #Self

Consistency is the horror of the world.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Consistency #World #Routine

Duty should be a byproduct.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Should #Duty

the death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Love You #Blow #Parent

Unless you listen, people are weazened in your presence; they become about a third of themselves. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #People #Listening

Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one. You can argue with a theologian or a politician, but doctors are sacrosanct. They know; you do not. Science has its mystique much more powerful than any religion active today.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Powerful #Science #Animal

it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #Live In The Moment #Care

People who try to boss themselves always want (however kindly) to boss other people. They always think they know best and are so stern and resolute about it they are not very open to new and better ideas.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #Ideas #People

we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #Ends #Fixed

I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Children #Memories #Flower

Now some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk. They do not know that ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come, but the better they are.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Strong #Coffee #Writing

it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. ... Pour out the dull things on paper too-you can tear them up afterward-for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Beautiful #Tears #Paper

So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing ...
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Self #Two

Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Helping Others #People #Imagination

If we don't act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Change #Work #Thinking

I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Hate #Mean #Thinking

Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Diaries #Honest

Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Truthful #Motto #Being Truthful

When we commit ourselves to writing for some part of each day, we are happier, more enlightened, alive, light-hearted and generous to everyone else. Even our health improves.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Light #Each Day

Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #People #Advertising

We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Children #Light #Vision

Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Time #Inspiration #Energy

There is that American pastime known as "kidding" - with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Passion #Feelings #Enthusiasm

If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Running #Men #Shoes

Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Wonder #Reason #Said

Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Laughter #Thinking #People

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
-- Brenda Ueland

#Believe #Hero #Ordinary

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Fun #Writing #People

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
-- Brenda Ueland

#People #Effort #Lilies

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: "Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out." And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Teacher #Attitude #Love You

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Believe #Writing #People

Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Creative #Live In The Present

We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Blessing #Thinking

Be bold, free, and truthful.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Truth #Truthful

Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me... to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing or changing the subject. No. My attitude is: "Tell me more. This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be wonderfully alive."
-- Brenda Ueland

#Attitude #Party #Thinking

If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Mother #Children #Doors

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Power #Thinking #Forever

Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Writing #Thinking #Drawing

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Teacher #Love You #Thinking

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Husband #Creative #Murderer

The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining. That is why you must freely and recklessly make new mistakes - in writing or in life - and do not fret about them but pass on and write more.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Mistake #Life Changing #Moving

The only way to love a person is...by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Believe #Listening #Alive

Know that it is good to work. Work with love, and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Passion #Thinking #Vanity

We should all know this: that listening is not talking; [it] is the gifted and great role and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective, and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Mother #Husband #Children

And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good
-- Brenda Ueland

#Listening #Doe #Beloved

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Talking #Listening #Roles

You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Thinking #Listening

Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.
-- Brenda Ueland

#People #Advice #Listening

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force...When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Powerful #Children #Writing

Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.
-- Brenda Ueland

#Art #Writing #Creativity