Quote

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

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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Good
Failure
Love
Passion
Think
Interesting
Thinking
Fear
Easy
Liking
Nothing
Anxious
Hard
Vanity
Work
Privilege

More quotes by Brenda Ueland

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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.
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Duty should be a byproduct.
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We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
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the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
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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.
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Consistency is the horror of the world.
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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.
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The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
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The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
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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.
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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.
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You Do Not Know Is in You— an Inexhaustible Fountain of Ideas. Another reason for writing a diary is to discover that the ideas in you are an inexhaustible fountain.
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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.
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... 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.
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Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.
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Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
Brenda Ueland