Really Living 19 Mar 2009 07:51 am
Tell your inner critic to “hush”.
“Another reason I don’t like critics (the one in myself as well in other people) is that they try to teach something without being it. They are like all those feeble, knock-kneed women afraid of bugs and burglers, who say to their husbands (in so many words): “Go out and fight you coward!” They are second-raters who have not the courage or love to make anything of themselves. Or they are like big game hunters, killing from a great, safe distance, with great ego-satisfaction (though they are entirely safe themselves and the shooting requires no muscular effort and not much skill) some nice little creature.
Of course I am sorry for them too. Because by encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover). Know that if you have a kind of cultured know-it-all in yourself who takes pleasure in pointing out what is not good, in discriminating, reasoning and comparing, you are bound under a knave. I wish you could be delivered.
For I know that the energy of the creative impulse comes from love and all it’s manifestations- admiration, compassion, glowing respect, gratitude, praise, compassion, tenderness, adoration, enthusiasm. …
…’You are kind to painters’ van Gogh wrote to his brother, ‘and I tell you the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people’. “
-Brenda Ueland, in “If You Want to Write”