Quote

Duty should be a byproduct.

Brenda Ueland

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Byproduct
Duty

More quotes by Brenda Ueland

Image
the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
Brenda Ueland
Image
The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Consistency is the horror of the world.
Brenda Ueland
Image
The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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
Image
Be bold, free, and truthful.
Brenda Ueland
Image
The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
Image
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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
Image
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.
Brenda Ueland
Image
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
Image
Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
Brenda Ueland