Brenda Ueland Imagination Quotations

The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won't do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years - the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.

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.

Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.

vivisection is not the same thing as scientific progress. There is such a thing as scientific progress. But this wholesale dedication of scientists to vivisection, which is the easy and cheap way, actually prevents them from scientific progress, for true progress is difficult and requires genius and imagination in its devoted workers.

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.