Didactic Quotes:

Communication is mutual feeling with someone, not a didactic process of information.

- Robert Creeley

source: Robert Creeley (1972). “A sense of measure”, London, Calder and Boyars

topic: Communication, Feelings, Information, Didactic

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

- D. H. Lawrence

source: D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey (2003). “Studies in Classic American Literature”, p.155, Cambridge University Press

topic: Art, Motherhood, Blood, Didactic, Implicit

I think it's hard to really write a song that will educate someone because songs are meant to be ... you don't want to be too didactic in a song because it doesn't make for good music. And I think the role of songs can be to inspire people but there needs to education and prose to back that up.

- John Legend

source: "Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. with John Legend". Live Q&As, www.washingtonpost.com. April 4, 2008.

topic: Song, Writing, Thinking, Didactic

What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.

- Joan D. Vinge

topic: Writing, Political, Want, Didactic

The apostolic writings are of three kinds: historical, didactic, and prophetic.

- Philip Schaff

source: Philip Schaff (2013). “Church History”, p.462, Lulu Press, Inc

topic: Writing, Historical, Three, Apostolic, Didactic

A child knows when they are on the receiving end of a didactic exercise, or when they are sitting in the shadow of something else.

- Tim Crouch

topic: Children, Exercise, Shadow, Didactic

If writing with a goal - whether it be evangelistic, apologetic, or didactic - implies propaganda, then all recorded history is propaganda. . . a work shouldn't be dismissed simply because of the strong convictions of the writer. Should we discount the facticity or reliability of the accounts of Nazi concentration camp survivors simply because they passionately recount their story?

- Paul Copan

topic: Strong, Writing, Goal, Apologetic, Didactic

The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work.

- Voltaire

source: Voltaire (1824). “A Philosophical Dictionary”, p.202

topic: Style, Addresses, Speech, Pleading, Didactic

The correct didactic analysis is one that does not in the least differ from the curative treatment. How, indeed, shall the future analyst learn the technique if he does not experience it just exactly as he is to apply it later?

- Otto Rank

topic: Doe, Analysis, Technique, Didactic

I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.

- John Shirley

topic: Writing, Thinking, Social, Didactic, Commentary

The best didactic for the elimination of the Ego it is found in the everyday life intensively lived.

- Samael Aun Weor

topic: Ego, Everyday, Elimination, Didactic

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

- Northrop Frye

source: Northrop Frye (1996). “Collected Works of Northrop Frye: The educated imagination and other writings on critical theory 1933-1963”

topic: Writing, May, Attributes, Didactic

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

- Vladimir Nabokov

topic: Art, Kindness, Soul, Didactic

As a writer, you get to bring attention to something without preaching. I don't believe in being didactic. So if you dramatize something, you automatically bring attention to it if people read it.

- Terry McMillan

source: Source: www.pbs.org

topic: Believe, People, Attention, Didactic

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

- George Bernard Shaw

source: George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more”, p.3332, e-artnow

topic: Art, Home, Successful, Didactic, Contention

The joy a person is usually seen to express at the conversion of another to his opinion is seldom more than the impulse of egotistical satisfaction at being considered worthy of didactic imitation.

- Norm MacDonald

topic: Joy, Opinion, Imitation, Didactic

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

- Stanley Kubrick

topic: Art, Thinking, Views, Didactic, Celluloid

Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.

- Maurice Sendak

source: "Maurice Sendak Sheds Moonlight on a Dark Tale". www.nytimes.com. 1993.

topic: Smart, Writing, Kids, Didactic, Vapid

Many of the early greats of sf — Hugo Gernsback (publisher of Amazing Stories) in particular — saw themselves as educators. The didactic thrust of science fiction got the genre initially pegged as children's fare. It was seen, at its best, as an extension of school and, at its worst, as teenage wish fulfillment.

- Samuel R. Delany

topic: Teenage, Children, School, Didactic

I'm really interested in social justice, and if an artist has a certain power of being heard and voicing something important, it's right to do it. It could still be done in such a way that it's not aggressive or overly didactic. I'm trying to find that form.

- Shirin Neshat

source: "The exotic and the everyday" by Richard Williams, www.theguardian.com. October 30, 2002.

topic: Artist, Justice, Important, Didactic

This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language.

- Gaston Bachelard

topic: Two, Choices, Wish, Didactic

A historian should not be didactic-that is a word that makes my blood run cold.

- Edmund Morgan

topic: Running, Blood, Cold, Didactic

If you look at the end of the movie [Monsegnor Lahzar], I give a lot of space to what the spectator can also imagine of what's going to be Bachir's life afterwards. So, there's the restraint part, and there's the fact that the story is happening in the school which allowed me to tackle all these subjects without making it too didactic, because in the school everything happens.

- Philippe Falardeau

topic: School, Space, Giving, Didactic

What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

- Aleksandar Hemon

source: Interview with Colum McCann, www.believermag.com. January, 2010.

topic: Political, Demand, Moral, Imports, Didactic

I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?

- Kehinde Wiley

topic: Beautiful, Art, Block, Didactic

An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.

- William C. Brown

topic: Philosophy, Practice, Age, Didactic, Digital Age

I do not like to be thought of as avant-garde or some kind of didactic artist.

- Lucinda Childs

topic: Artist, Avant Garde, Kind, Didactic

Don't be didactic - don't write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the 'idea' dynamically and without preaching.

- Robert McKee

topic: Inspiration, Writing, Character, Didactic

Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.

- Charles Baudelaire

topic: Artist, Past, Reality, Didactic, New Paths

The songs we sing invite the participation of the listener, who is central to finding a way of creating the life of the song at that listening. It's the difference between poetry and didactic writing. One tells you, 'This is it,' and the other says, 'Let's find this together.'

- Peter Yarrow

topic: Song, Writing, Differences, Didactic

I didn't want the film to be didactic, and this is tough because if you look at the list of issues, you have immigration, the education system, you have the grieving, you have suicide. I think what saved me were two things. I tried to do everything with some level of restraint and let the spectator make up his own mind.

- Philippe Falardeau

topic: Suicide, Thinking, Grieving, Didactic

I'm really sort of cautious about being too didactic. To me there are writers that can do that, but I think they drown in that after a while. I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.

- Adam Braver

source: Source: therumpus.net

topic: Jobs, Thinking, Raises Questions, Didactic

Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible.

- Chinua Achebe

source: Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

topic: Teacher, Art, Children, Chalk, Didactic

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.

- Sally Potter

topic: Thinking, Cinema, Want, Didactic, Polemics

The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.

- D. H. Lawrence

source: D. H. Lawrence (1966). “Selected Poems of D.h. Lawrence”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

topic: Perfect, Rainbow, Novelists, Didactic

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

- Eugenio Montale

topic: Writing, Connections, Poet, Utilitarian, Didactic

It takes a long time to write a book. I'm not going to spend that much time trying to deliver a message. The reason I do it is because I want to understand something myself. It's not a delivery device, it's an inquiry device. Didactic fiction to my mind never works. It backfires.

- Ruth Ozeki

topic: Book, Writing, Long, Didactic, Backfire

When I was younger I was much more polemical and didactic, much less trusting. Inherently my own vision of the world would weave its way through the characters. Also, my concerns are changing. What happens is you write a few plays and get boxed into some idea of what your concerns are and what you're supposed to be writing about.

- Eve Ensler

topic: Writing, Character, Play, Didactic

I don't like making didactic, pedagogical documentaries based on standard formulas of narration: I'm only interested in the ambitious French tradition of the documentaire de création where the film, if successful, is not about something but that something itself. The goal is to incorporate areas of risk and paradox that we associate with cinematic art.

- Damian Pettigrew

source: Le Parisien, May, 2003.

topic: Art, Successful, Goal, Didactic, Narration

Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.

- Richard Dawkins

topic: Mean, Atheism, Purpose, Likelihood, Fours

I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

- David Foster Wallace

topic: Character, Thinking, Ideas, Didactic

I don't like to talk about messages so much with films simply because it's a little more didactic. The reason I'm a filmmaker is to tell stories and so you hope that they will have resonance for people and for the kind of things you're talking about.

- Jonathan Nolan

source: Source: collider.com

topic: Talking, People, Stories, Didactic

Science fiction has a way of letting you talk about where we are in the world and letting you be a bit of a pop philosopher without being didactic.

- Brit Marling

topic: World, Way, Fiction, Didactic

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.

- Peter Greenaway

source: Interview in Art and Design, no. 49,

topic: Art, Wish, Cinema, Didactic

We cannot doubt that animals both love and practice music. That is evident. But it seems their musical system differs from ours. It is another school....We are not familiar with their didactic works. Perhaps they don't have any.

- Erik Satie

topic: Music, School, Animal, Didactic

I had a huge advantage when I started 50 years ago - my job was secure. I didn't have to promote myself. These days there's far more pressure to make a mark, so the temptation is to make adventure television or personality shows. I hope the more didactic approach won't be lost.

- David Attenborough

source: "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Jobs, Adventure, Years, Didactic

It’s the ability to bring events and characters to a resolution that draws me to writing, especially writing for children. I don’t want to ever be didactic, but if there’s something I do want to say, it’s that you can bring things around. You can make a change. Adult novels are about letting go. Children’s novels are about getting a grip.

- Tim Wynne-Jones

topic: Letting Go, Children, Writing, Didactic