Quotes by Brenda Ueland

“The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.”

“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.”

“So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”

“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.”

“All children have creative power.”

“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.

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.

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

...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?

(about William Blake)As for Blakes happiness--a man who knew him said: If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy....He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven.

(about William Blake)[Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and imaginative death.And what we so often call reason and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. It wont pay. People will think it is silly. No one else does it. It is immoral.But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.For this Reason as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things. And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against mere enthusiasm, Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): Mere enthusiasm is the All in All!

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

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

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.

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.