Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me... to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing or changing the subject. No. My attitude is: "Tell me more. This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be wonderfully alive."

Brenda Ueland

Categorized in : Thinking Attitude Party

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

Brenda Ueland

originals important

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.

Brenda Ueland

reason wonder said

You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.

Brenda Ueland

listening knows thinking

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.

Brenda Ueland

fighting compassion art

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

care live-in-the-moment thinking

So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing.

Brenda Ueland

self writing two

the death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.

Brenda Ueland

parent blow love-you

Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.

Brenda Ueland

creative-power live-in-the-present creative

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

creating creativity inspiration

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.

Brenda Ueland

creativity six long

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

Brenda Ueland

three love-you talking

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.

Brenda Ueland

creativity writing children

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

Brenda Ueland

talent humans

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

listening-to-others tired people

Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.

Brenda Ueland

nice love-you mean

We should all know this: that listening is not talking; [it] is the gifted and great role and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective, and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.

Brenda Ueland

husband mother children

The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.

Brenda Ueland

best-way trying way

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

Brenda Ueland

murderer husband creative

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

Brenda Ueland

grows listening ideas

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good.

Brenda Ueland

artist peace people