Top 60 Brenda Ueland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Brenda Ueland

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

— Brenda Ueland

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

— Brenda Ueland

5. “Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly. prime it with a little solitude.”

— Brenda Ueland

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

— Brenda Ueland

7. “Be bold, free, and truthful.”

— Brenda Ueland

8. “Consistency is the horror of the world.”

— Brenda Ueland

9. “The imagination needs moodling, – long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”

— Brenda Ueland

10. “Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.”

— Brenda Ueland

11. “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

12. “Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.”

— Brenda Ueland

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Brenda Ueland

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

— Brenda Ueland

20. “It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.”

— Brenda Ueland

21. “And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good.”

— Brenda Ueland

22. “All children have creative power.”

— Brenda Ueland

23. “You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.”

— Brenda Ueland

24. “When we commit ourselves to writing for some part of each day, we are happier, more enlightened, alive, light-hearted and generous to everyone else. Even our health improves.”

— Brenda Ueland

25. “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

26. “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

27. “The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining. That is why you must freely and recklessly make new mistakes – in writing or in life – and do not fret about them but pass on and write more.”

— Brenda Ueland

28. “If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign. It means that your vision can see so far that it’s hard to come up to it. Again I say – the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.”

— Brenda Ueland

29. “Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.”

— Brenda Ueland

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

— Brenda Ueland

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

— Brenda Ueland

32. “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

33. “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

34. “You do not know what is in you – an inexhaustible fountain of ideas.”

— Brenda Ueland

35. “For when you come to think of it, the only way to love a person is not, as the stereotyped Christian notion is, to coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick, but 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.”

— Brenda Ueland

36. “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

37. “It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.”

— Brenda Ueland

38. “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

39. “The only way to find your true self is by recklessness and freedom.”

— Brenda Ueland

40. “No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.”

— Brenda Ueland

41. “Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.”

— Brenda Ueland

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

— Brenda Ueland

43. “Duty should be a byproduct.”

— Brenda Ueland

44. “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

45. “The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.”

— Brenda Ueland

46. “Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.”

— Brenda Ueland

47. “We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.”

— Brenda Ueland

48. “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

49. “We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.”

— Brenda Ueland

50. “They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer – some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky – are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one’s life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.”

— Brenda Ueland