Brenda Ueland Quotes

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

... 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.

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

We are too ready (women especially) not to stand by what we have said or done.

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

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

... 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.

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.

Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.

Duty should be a byproduct.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Everybody is talented original and has something important to say.

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

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.

...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?

By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).