"Dabbler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him to this strange double life were such as a Lars Larssen could scarcely comprehend. Every man has his mental as well as his physical limitations. The keenest brain, if trained on some specialized line, will fail to understand what to the dabbler in many lines seems perfectly natural and reasonable. Larssen, a master-mind, had his peculiar limitations as well as smaller men. His brain had been trained to see the world as an ant-heap into which some Power External had ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... Lincoln had a philosophy of his own, which, strange as it may appear, was in perfect harmony with his character in all other respects. He was no dabbler in divination—astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghostly lore, ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... health, and that her intellectual faculties had been kept in full and healthy exercise, nor had once afforded the suspicion of a tendency towards artistic utterance in any direction. She was no mere dabbler in anything: in music, for instance, she had studied thorough bass, and studied it well; yet her playing was such as I have already described it. She understood perspective, and could copy an etching, in pen and ink, to a hair's-breadth, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... were kindred spirits, differing widely in intellectual power, but equally vain, restless, false and malevolent. Montgomery was introduced to Neville Payne, one of the most adroit and resolute agents of the exiled family, Payne had been long well known about town as a dabbler in poetry and politics. He had been an intimate friend of the indiscreet and unfortunate Coleman, and had been committed to Newgate as an accomplice in the Popish plot. His moral character had not stood high; but he soon ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... as it should be. Such subjects as music, drawing, cooking, housekeeping, wood-carving, nursing, needlework, when they are studied at all, are studied more professionally and thoroughly and intelligently, and less in the spirit of the amateur and dabbler. So I would say to you, both now and when you leave, show that your education in intelligence has given you wide interests and powers to master all such subjects. Take them up all ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... historians as 'a little piece of wood, to which a string was fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round to make a roaring noise.' The performers in the 'mysteries' at which this implement was used daubed themselves all over with clay. Demosthenes describes the mother of Aeschines as a dabbler in mysteries, and tells how Aeschines used to assist her by helping to bedaub the initiate with clay and bran. Various explanations have been offered of these practices, but let us see how they tally with any prevailing customs. First, the bull-roarer is to be found in almost every country in the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... worldly goods, but that little the fair young widow had all the wit to turn to good account. There was a house in Paternoster Row and a series of notebooks. Like many another physician of his time, George Turner had been a dabbler in more arts than that of medicine, an investigator in sciences other than pathology. His notebooks would appear to have contained more than remedial prescriptions for agues, fevers, and rheums. There was, for example, a recipe ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure |
