Didacticism Quotes & Sayings

Homer's Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. — Marshall McLuhan

I don't like things I work on to have political didacticism - there are questions, but not messages. — Jonathan Nolan

It is natural if you feel as strongly as most decent people do about racial discrimination to welcome books that give it short shrift; but to assess books on their racial attitude rather than their literary value, and still more to look on books as ammunition in the battle, is to take a further and still more dangerous step from literature-as-morality to literature-as-propaganda - a move toward conditions in which, hitherto, literary art has signally failed to thrive.

("Didacticism in Modern Dress" from Only Connect (2nd ed., 1980). — John Rowe Townsend

A man and his tools make a man and his trade. — Vita Sackville-West

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. — Pablo Picasso

I do prime time network shows like 'Blue Bloods.' I've done 'Fringe,' I've done 'The Good Wife,' done a lot of 'The Mentalist.' — John Polson

We should live our lives as though Christ was coming this afternoon. — Jimmy Carter

This is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity ... You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I do enjoy wearing Japanese and Italian clothing. I also enjoy my blue jeans or tennis shorts and running shoes. I like driving a Porsche because it is an elegant machine and it is a very beautiful experience to drive it. It's magnificently made. — Frederick Lenz

We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality. — Walter Brueggemann

Grief hallows hearts, even while it ages heads. — Philip James Bailey

Today exists between yesterday and tomorrow. — Catherine Gilbert Murdock

I'm not afraid to upset people. But I am not as upset because I understand what I'm up against. — Denzel Washington

There was much that was endearing in this strangely Russian search for absolutes - such as the passion for big ideas that gave the literature of nineteenth-century Russia its unique character and power - and yet the underside of this idealism was a badgering didacticism, a moral dogmatism and intolerance, which in its own way was just as harmful as the censorship it opposed. — Orlando Figes

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history. — Mal Peet

I've always had a dislike of any form of didacticism, especially when it becomes the dominant element in writing. Character and emotional content should always be the strong elements. I think that was maybe what went wrong with my early novel, that I wanted it to be too profound, I was trying to put too much into it. I learned fairly early that one can handle only so much idea in a story. Well, or rather, I can! — Peter Taylor

It's like life, isn't it? You think you'll outrun it, that you're better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself. — Richard Flanagan

American literature has, since the time of the Puritans, featured the jeremiad as a prolonged complaint, a prophet's indictment of his society characteristic of work such as the muckrakers' novels or Allan Ginsberg's "Howl." Doctorow struggles to accommodate this form to his artistry (as successful practitioners of the work have always done). To this end, he has repeatedly adapted genres such as the Western, the romance, and the detective novel, often playing with accepted conventions, and thus avoiding didacticism. — Michelle M. Tokarczyk

Didacticism is the death of art ... — Alice Dunbar Nelson

Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did - unprepared though we were - that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody! — Edith Wharton