TO BE KIND is more important than to be right. Many times what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens. F.SCOTT FITZGERALD
IN THE VERY END, CIVILIZATIONS PERISH BECAUSE THEY LISTEN TO THEIR POLITICIANS AND NOT THEIR POETS. JONAS MEKAS
NOT A SINGLE WOMAN has been accepted as a
christ, a buddha, a prophet — no. If a woman manages somehow to get into religious matters she is called a witch . . . OHSO
WHEN WE LOSE SOMEONE we love, we must learn not to live without them, but to live with the love they left behind. Unknown
I WILL NOT REASON AND COMPARE, MY BUSINESS IS TO CREATE. WILLIAM BLAKE
BRENDA UELAND 1891-1985. “If You Want To Write”.
THE BEST WAY to know the truth or beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence here or yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e. share it with others?
THIS IS WHAT I LEARNED: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.
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.
THE ONLY WAY TO LOVE A PERSON IS . . .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.
THE DEATH OF ANY LOVED PARENT is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.
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.
WHEN WE ARE LISTENED TO, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
YOUR MOTTO: BE BOLD, BE FREE, BE TRUTHFUL.
I LEARNED that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, — happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
WRITE A TRUE, careless, lovingly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
THE IMAGINATION NEEDS MOODLING — LONG, INEFFICIENT HAPPY IDLING, DAWDLING AND PUTTERING.
THINK OF YOURSELF as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
EVERYONE KNOWS how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter, — making us think of funnier and funnier things.
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.
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.
CREATIVE POWER FLOURISHES ONLY WHEN I AM LIVING IN THE PRESENT.
WE LIKE FIXED RULES because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
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.
THE ONLY WAY to become a better writer is to become a better person.
THE BEST WAY TO KNOW TRUTH OR BEAUTY IS TO TRY TO EXPRESS IT.
INSPIRATION comes to us slowly and quietly — prime it with a little solitude.
SINCE you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
. . . THE SPIRIT , I THINK, is a stream, a fountain and must be continually poured out, for only if it is poured out will more and clearer streams comes.
THE ONLY WAY TO WRITE WELL, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touch by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.
IN TRUE COURAGE there is always an element of choice, of an ethical choice, and of anguish and also of action and deed. There is always a flame of spirit in it, a vision of some necessity higher than oneself.
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 every 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 star?” 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.