Brenda Ueland Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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