• ... everyone who is human has something to express. Try not expressing yourself for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter, or draw a picture, or sing, or make a dress or a garden.

• 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.

• 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.

• Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. You can see that when you think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays. (Strength to Your Sword Arm)

• ... the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

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

• These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: "I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget." But they have no slow, big ideas.

Ulam, Stanislaw

• It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs.

Ullman, Harvey

• Anyone who stops learning is old, whether this happens at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young, but becomes constantly more valuable regardless of physical capacity.

Ullman, James Ramsey

• Challenge is the core and the mainspring of all human activity. If there's an ocean, we cross it; if there's a disease, we cure it; if there's a wrong, we right it; if there's a record, we break it; and finally, if there's a mountain, we climb it.

• It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp.

Underhill, Evelyn

• All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty; for beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love.

• But so many Christians are like deaf people at a concert. They study the programme carefully, believe every statement make in it, speak respectfully of the quality of the music, but only really hear a phrase now and again. So they have no notion at all of the mighty symphony which fills the universe, to which our lives are destined to make their tiny contribution, and which is the self-expression of the Eternal God. (The Spiritual Life)

• The practical life of a vast number of people is not, as a matter of fact, worth while at all. It is like an impressive fur coat with no one inside it. One sees many of these coats occupying positions of great responsibility. Hans Andersen's story of the king with no clothes told one bitter and common truth about human nature; but the story of the clothes with no king describes a situation just as common and even more pitiable. (The Spiritual Life)

• We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do... forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in , the fundamental verb, to Be. (The Spiritual Life)

Undset, Sigrid

• No doing without some ruing. (Kristin Lavensdatter: The Bridal Wreath)

Unser, Bobby

• Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.

Unsworth, Jean

• Creativity comes with being human; it is the power to think new, to imagine, to see a metaphor. Animals make by instinct. People get new ideas. All you need is an open mind.

Updike, John

• Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure of writing. (in Singular Encounters by Attallah)

USA Today

• Humor helps us to think out of the box. The average child laughs about 400 times per day, the average adult laughs only 15 times per day. What happened to the other 385 laughs?

Usinov, Peter

• Did you know that the worldwide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day, only one day, of modern warfare.

• It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.

Utech, Mary Kay

• It's not a problem that we have a problem. It's a problem if we don't deal with the problem.

• Our task is to provide an education for the kind of kids we have... Not the kind of kids we used to have... Or want to have... Or the kids that exist in our dreams.

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