Top 81 Ueland Quotes
#1. 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
Julia Cameron
#2. 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
#3. The death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.
Brenda Ueland
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
Brenda Ueland
#9. Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.
Brenda Ueland
#10. Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,
making us think of funnier and funnier things.
Brenda Ueland
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
Brenda Ueland
#15. The imagination needs moodling,
long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
#16. At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.
Brenda Ueland
#17. You can write anything you want to,
a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.
Brenda Ueland
#18. Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.
Brenda Ueland
#19. [4It is hard to be carefree when you have many anxieties. But the more you have, the more necessary it is to feel carefree for a time, so that you will get some new ideas on how to deal with your anxieties.]
Brenda Ueland
#20. 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
#21. I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
Brenda Ueland
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.
Brenda Ueland
#26. You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.
Brenda Ueland
#27. Everyone is talented, original and has something important to say.
Brenda Ueland
#28. 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
#31. The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self. The reader reads it and is immediately infected and has exactly the same feeling. This is the whole secret of enchantment and fascination.
Brenda Ueland
#32. The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?
Brenda Ueland
#33. 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
#34. Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.
Brenda Ueland
#36. 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
#37. Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time.
Brenda Ueland
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
Brenda Ueland
#41. If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.
Brenda Ueland
#42. Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.
Brenda Ueland
#43. Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
Brenda Ueland
#44. We like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
Brenda Ueland
#45. We are too ready (women especially) not to stand by what we have said or done.
Brenda Ueland
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. A great musician once told me that one should never play a single note without hearing it, feeling that it is true, thinking it beautiful.
Brenda Ueland
#49. The great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.
Brenda Ueland
#51. We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.
Brenda Ueland
#52. 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
#53. Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Brenda Ueland
#54. To paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.
Brenda Ueland
#55. You do not know what is in you - an inexhaustible fountain of ideas.
Brenda Ueland
#56. Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.
Brenda Ueland
#57. They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer - some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky - are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one's life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.
Brenda Ueland
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).
Brenda Ueland
#61. 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
#62. The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
Brenda Ueland
#63. Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
Brenda Ueland
#64. The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining,
Brenda Ueland
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.
Brenda Ueland
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. Writing is not a performance but a generosity.
Brenda Ueland
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.
Brenda Ueland
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
Brenda Ueland
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