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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
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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Trying
Kindly
Always
Boss
Think
However
Thinking
Opinion
People
Open
Best
Ideas
Stern
Better
Resolute
More quotes by Brenda Ueland
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Brenda Ueland
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
We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.
Brenda Ueland
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
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.
Brenda Ueland
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
Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
Brenda Ueland
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
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
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
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
Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
Brenda Ueland
Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
Brenda Ueland
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
Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
Brenda Ueland
