"Dilettante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... business to do so, because it's the way of advancing himself. He aims at being Home Secretary one of these days, and I shouldn't wonder if he is. There's your real social reformer. Egremont's an amateur, a dilettante. In many ways he's worth a hundred of Dalmaine, but Dalmaine will benefit the world, and it's well if ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Toledo Church, one presses one's face against the iron bars that separate one from the Burial of Count Orguz, it is neither as a Dilettante nor an Idealist that one holds one's breath. Those youthful pontifical saints, so richly arrayed, offering with slender royal hands that beautiful body to the dust—is their mysterious gesture only the rhythm of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... thoroughly respectable and thoroughly pretentious institution. In fact, he was just the sort of man who should never have attempted to write a Life of George Sand or to interpret George Sand's genius. He was too feminine to appreciate the grandeur of that large womanly nature, too much of a dilettante to realise the masculine force of that strong and ardent mind. He never gets at the secret of George Sand, and never brings us near to her wonderful personality. He looks on her simply as a litterateur, as a writer of pretty stories of country life and of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... know—oftener the things I feel." Bond was speaking with a greater sincerity than he usually permitted himself. The right touch just then might have determined his future: he was quite as willing to become a Veritist as to remain a mere Dilettante. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... the balance of the day Mr. Woodchuck was a dilettante, sitting at his door in the sun and dreaming dreams of artistic elegance in horticulture. I used to see him there about 10 A.M., wrinkling his forehead in the perplexity of artistic temperament, batting a speculative eye at me ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... was resolved that thenceforward he must rely upon himself, carve out his own destiny. But—would the art that he had cultivated with such assiduity, yield him a livelihood if sincerely practised with that end in view? Would the mental and physical equipment of a painter, heretofore dilettante, enable him to ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... his that was not done until death released the most steadfast hero of that cruel war. Men speculate as to his religion. It was the religion of the seer, the hero, the patriot, and the lover of his race and time. Amid the political idiocy of the times, the corruption in high places, the dilettante culture, the vaporings of wild and helpless theorists, in this swamp of political quagmire, O Lincoln, it is refreshing ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... say, at the present moment," he observed, "but it is one that will have to engage our serious attention and consideration before long. The first thing that we shall have to do is to get out of the dilettante and academic way of approaching it. We must collect and assimilate hard facts. It is a subject that ought to appeal to all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it surprisingly difficult to interest people ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... we have to expect from this book. Not the soft, flabby, indifferent, contradictory objectivity of the scientific dilettante, of the arch-eunuch: but a mettlesome objectivity which is appropriate in this fighting age, the objectivity of one who honestly attempts to see everything and to know everything; but who, having done so, endeavours to organise his data in accordance ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... went on reflectively, "comes from Marseilles. Rather a dangerous heredity, when one thinks of the Latin attitude towards women. But then, I sometimes wonder whether Denis is altogether serious-minded, whether he isn't rather a dilettante. It's very difficult. What do ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... the feminine element." In the education and elevation of woman we are yet to learn the true manhood and womanhood, the true masculine and feminine elements. Dio Lewis is rapidly changing our ideas of feminine beauty. In the large waists and strong arms of the girls under his training, some dilettante gentleman may mourn a loss of feminine delicacy. So in the wise, virtuous, self-supporting, common-sense women we propose as the mothers of the future republic, the reverend gentleman may see a lack of what he considers the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... amused first by the marriage of the Duc d'Orleans to Princess Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and by the subsequent wedding of Princess Marie d'Orleans, the amateur sculptress, to Duke Alexander of Wurtemberg, a dilettante, like herself, in letters. The occasion provoked the German poet Heine, then lying ill at Paris, to some of his most pungent witticisms. Ailing though he was, Heine was made a member of the new "Societe des Gens de Lettres," founded by Balzac, Lamennais, Dumas and Georges Sand. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... pleasant to the parson as the most beautiful landscapes of Italy can be to the dilettante. He paused a moment at the wicket to look around him, and distended his nostrils voluptuously to inhale the smell of the sweet peas, mixed with that of the new-mown hay in the fields behind, which a slight breeze bore ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not in what remains unwritten that the singer's true greatness is revealed? What dilettante has not felt the power of a more incisive attack of the note; of that prolongation of the note, held imperceptibly, which, having captured it, holds the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... the Dilettante stalks abroad. The Amateur is loosed. The voice of the Aesthete is heard in the land, and catastrophe ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... new performance—'tis the last of seven. To give that number is the custom here: 'Twas by a Dilettante written, And Dilettanti in the parts appear. That now I vanish, pardon, I entreat you! As Dilettante ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... Dawn is engaged to Eweword? If she is let me know in time to send her a wedding present. I'd like to, because she's your friend," he said with such elaborate unconcern that I had difficulty in suppressing a smile. His step-brother, the dilettante, would never have been so clumsily transparent in a ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... consistency's sake, in the manner in which it had originally been designed rather than in accordance with the artistic tastes that formed the consolation of his old age. He was a painter, a writer, a dramatist, a modern dilettante, addicted to private theatricals. There is something very attractive in the image that he has imprinted on the page of history. He was both clever and kind, and many reverses and much suffering had not embittered him nor quenched his faculty of enjoyment. He was fond of his sweet Provence, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... with them, or, at all events, impress people with a sense of our enjoyment of them. There is a noble piece of character-drawing in one of Mr. Henry James's novels, The Portrait of a Lady, where Gilbert Osmond, a selfish dilettante, finding that he cannot make a great success or attain a great position, devotes himself to trying to mystify and provoke the curiosity of the world by retiring into a refined seclusion, and professing that it affords him an exquisite kind of enjoyment. The hideous ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and observe the effect this work has upon a young, healthy man with strongly normal feeling. You see elevation, invigoration, warm and honest enthusiasm, perhaps stimulation to some 'artistic' creation of his own ... The good dilettante! Our hearts look very different from what he dreams, with his 'warm heart' and 'honest enthusiasm.' I have seen artists surrounded by adoring women and shouting youths, whereas I knew about them ... ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... strong sense, passing at times into the narrowest insular prejudice, detested the Frenchified fine gentleman who minced his mother tongue and piqued himself on cosmopolitan indifference to patriotic sentiment: the ambitious historian was irritated by the contempt which the dilettante dabbler in literature affected for their common art; and the thoroughgoing Whig was scandalised by the man who, whilst claiming that sacred name, and living face to face with Chatham and Burke and the great Revolution families in all their ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... arrival in Italy he wrote several minor pieces, but his music did not attract public attention until his return to Paris, when his three-act opera, "Clari," brought out Dec. 9, 1828, with Malibran in the principal role, made a success. "Le Dilettante d'Avignon" (a satire on Italian librettos), "Manon Lescaut" (a ballet in three acts), "La Langue Musicale," "La Tentation," and "Les Souvenirs" rapidly followed "Clari," with alternating successes and failures. In 1835 his great work, "La Juive," appeared, and in the same ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... expression would be so too. Many observers, with no particular philosophy to adduce, feel that the arts among us are somehow impotent, and they look for a better inspiration, now to ancient models, now to the raw phenomena of life. A dilettante may, indeed, summon inspiration whence he will; and a virtuoso will never lack some material to keep him busy; but if what is hoped for is a genuine, native, inevitable art, a great revolution would first have to be worked in society. We should ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... are always found, sometimes suggested, sometimes copied, most frequently idealized, is she not the most perfect symbol of his talent,—elegant, graceful, and penetrated throughout with a chaste voluptuousness? The Christian nourished on Plato and Greek Art, the friend of Leo X., the dilettante Pope, the artist who died of love while painting the Transfiguration, did he not live entirely in these modest Venuses holding on their knees a child who is Love? If we wished to symbolize the genius of every painter in an allegorical picture, would it be ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... heart of fellowship, the core and pith and symbol of masculine friendship and good talk. Your cigar will do for drummers, your cigarettes for the dilettante smoker, but for the ripened, boneset votary nothing but a briar will suffice. Away with meerschaum, calabash, cob, and clay: they have their purpose in the inscrutable order of things, like crossing sweepers and presidents of women's clubs; but when Damon and Pythias meet to talk ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... delineate, deliquescent, demarcation, demimonde, demoniac, denizen, denouement, deprecate, depreciate, derelict, derogatory, despicable, desuetude, desultory, deteriorate, diacritical, diagnosis, diaphanous, diatribe, didactic, diffusive, dilatory, dilettante, dipsomania, dirigible, discommode, discretionary, discursive, disintegrate, disparity, dispensable, disseminate, dissimulation, dissonant, distain, divagation, divination, divulge, dolor, dorsal, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... a part in the life and luxury of those far-away centuries for its production to be allowed to languish. The magnificence of every great man, whether pope, king or dilettante, was ill-expressed before his fellows if he were not constantly surrounded by the storied cloths that were the indispensable accessories of wealth and glory. Palaces and castles were hung with them, the tents of military encampments were made gorgeous with their richness, and no joust nor ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... caricatures; but perhaps he was never more happily treated than when he enters as Harlequin, armed with a goose quill, and assisted by John Kemble and the famous Mrs. Siddons, in "Blowing up the Pic Nics." To the same class and subject of satire belongs the "Pic Nic Orchestra" and "Dilettante Theatre"—this last a Green-room scene which seems reminiscent of Hogarth's print of a similar subject. "Two-penny Whist" and "Push-pin" are filled with contemporary portraits;[11] and the two series of "Cockney Sportsmen" (4 plates, 1800) and "Elements of Skating" (4 ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... had been minister since 1765, thus found himself suddenly converted from a dilettante and sportsman, lounging through life, into a busy diplomat, at the centre of affairs of critical moment. At sixty-two the change could scarcely have been welcome to him, but to his beautiful and ambitious wife the access of importance was sweet, for it led ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... begin again. A bran-new piece, the very last of seven; To have so much, the fashion here thinks fit. By Dilettantes it is given; 'Twas by a Dilettante writ. Excuse me, sirs, I go to greet you; I ...
— Faust • Goethe
... before them. But she was determined in her purpose, and regarded the College Settlement as the one opening and refuge for the energies which had too long been given to the arrangement of paper chases across country, and the routine of society, and dilettante interest in kindergartens. Life had become for her real and earnest, and she rejected Bruce-Brice of the British Legation with the sad and hopeless kindness of one who almost contemplates taking the ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... middle of the nineteenth century art had been regarded as a luxury for the rich dilettante,—the people heard little of it, and thought less. The utensils and furniture of the middle class were fashioned only with a view to utility; there was a popular belief that beautiful things were expensive, and the thrifty housekeeper who had no money to put into ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... have produced, as extraordinarily "grown up." The new generation which France sent into the war of defence was more simple and more ardent at the outset than our own analogous generation was. It was less dilettante and more intellectual. The evidences of thought, of reasoned reflection carried out to its full extent, of an adequate realization of the problems presented by life, are manifest, though in various degree, in all these records of French officers killed ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... in Germany, and on account of their thoroughness he has always been an upholder of German methods. One of his complaints against the Italian Positivists is that they only read second-rate works in French or at the most "the dilettante booklets published in such profusion by the Anglo-Saxon press." This tendency towards German thought, especially in philosophy, depends upon the fact of the former undoubted supremacy of Germany in that field, but Croce does not for a moment ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... early widowed. Her experience of married life included a bare two years, her husband living a twelve-month longer than the friends of both had predicted. He was, so it was rumored, a charming fellow of rare artistic taste and discrimination, a dilettante, and a connoisseur of all things beautiful. So sensitively was he organized that inharmonies or discords of color, or any lack of artistic perception affected him acutely, often to the verge of illness, and always irritation. Although he permitted his wife no voice in the decoration ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... at this time the scene of an intellectual and aesthetic revival dominated by Frederick the Great. The latter, a dilettante in culture, was, as Mendelssohn said of him, a man "who made the arts and sciences flourish, and made liberty of thought universal in his realm." The German Jews were as yet outside this revival. In Italy and Holland the new movements of the seventeenth and the eighteenth ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... have been shortly after this that Marivaux returned to Paris to continue his studies, and possibly to prepare himself for the life of a literary dilettante. His means were sufficient to enable him to indulge his taste in this way. Here we find him admitted to the salon of Mme. de Lambert, held in her famous apartments, situated at the corner of the rue Richelieu and the rue Colbert, and now replaced by a portion ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... Farrell comings and goings, the Farrell courtesies and benefactions, possibly be hid?—was watched only by friendly and discreet eyes, thanks always to Hester. Most people liked William Farrell; even that stricter sect, who before the war had regarded him as a pleasure loving dilettante, and had been often scandalised by his careless levity in the matter of his duties as a landlord and county magnate. 'Bill Farrell' had never indeed evicted or dealt hardly with any mortal tenant. He had merely neglected and ignored them; had cared not a brass ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... independent mind, and transgressed against the best traditions of Prussian administration. The prestige of the new reign was soon exhausted. Those who had believed Frederick William to be a man of genius now denounced him as a vaporous, inflated dilettante; his enthusiasm was seen to indicate nothing in particular; his sonorous commonplaces fell flat on second delivery. Not only in his own kingdom, but in the minor German States, which looked to Prussia as the future leader of a free Germany, the opinion rapidly ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... flits from one curiosity to another, if for fear of being narrow and with the hope of being broad, he forsakes every occupation before it can set its seal upon him, if he is through and through dilettante, jack-of-all-trades, he is a man only less poverty-stricken than a tramp. He has the illusion of efficiency. He wonders that society generally judges that he is not worth his salt, that on every battlefield Hotspur curses him for a popinjay, that in every company of ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... conceited." Those who like myself knew only the solemnity of the painter in advanced years have a difficulty in supposing in the child such traits compatible. These songs of the domestic affections were set to music; the father, as a dilettante complete, cultivated all the harmonies whether of thought, form, or sound; the home ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... very generally recognized as a discerning dilettante in most matters artistic. He was an excellent judge of literature, painting, and sculpture, . . his house, though small, was a perfect model of taste in design and adornment, . . he knew where to pick up choice bits of antique furniture, dainty porcelain, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... economics and public affairs, and to enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale, given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom became more certain; instead of being expelled, we ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... predisposed them to it; but they would not so rapidly have attained to such perfection had not the old geographers shown them the way. The influence of the existing Italian geographies on the spirit and tendencies of the travellers and discoverers was also inestimable. Even the simple 'dilettante' of a science— if in the present case we should assign to Aeneas Sylvius so low a rank—can diffuse just that sort of general interest in the subject which prepares for new pioneers the indispensable favourable predisposition in the public mind. True discoverers ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Republic has grown to be a very different thing from that weak beginning, but its national air is as popular as ever. The people do not merely love it. They glory in it. And yet apologies are sometimes made for it. By whom? By the soulless dilettante. The people know better:—the farmers, the mechanics, the fishermen, the dry-goods clerks, the newsboys, the railway stokers, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick-makers, the tinkers, the tailors, ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... lacked discretion if not sincerity. "Who are these men who, in newspapers or elsewhere, are cracking their whips over me and playing schoolmaster to the party? They are of various sorts and conditions. Some of them are the man-milliners, the dilettante and carpet knights of politics, whose efforts have been expended in denouncing and ridiculing and accusing honest men.... Some of them are men who, when they could work themselves into conventions, have attempted to belittle and befoul Republican administrations and to parade their own ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young friend is largely the theme of a poem, Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse. The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, Lillian, How to Rhyme for Love, The Talented Man; Byron, Childe Harold, Don Juan.] A few of Tennyson's ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... walking very delicately, with his head drooping towards his left shoulder, and his hands dangling in a dilettante manner at his sides, Madame Valtesi appeared at the French window of the drawing-room, refusing to join Tommy in some boyish game. After a parleying, which she conducted in profile, she turned her full face round, and having ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to him that his energies all lay fallow. My father, stern as his conception of duty was, had a horror of applying any intellectual pressure to us. I myself must confess that I was distinctly idle and dilettante both as a boy at Eton and as a Cambridge undergraduate. But much as my father appreciated and applauded any little successes, I was often surprised that I was never taken to task for my poor performances in work and scholarship. The truth was that my eldest ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... conspicuous pictorial exponents were Scots by birth, but they had lived so long abroad that Scotland had become to them little more than a memory. The work of the former was in many ways an embodiment of the current dilettante conception of art, and kindred in kind, though earlier in date, to that of Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) under whose sway, towards the close of the century, classic ideals came to dominate the art of Europe outside these isles. His usefulness ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... of young Marshall, Pendleton," said the lawyer. "But, also, he is no match for Gosford. He is a dilettante. He paints little pictures after the fashion he learned in Paris, and he has no force or vigor in him. His father was a dreamer, a wanderer, one who loved the world and its frivolities, and the son takes that temperament, softened by his mother. He ought ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... Colonel's age. Durant knew a man who had taught himself the 'cello at fifty-five. But the Colonel was not that sort of adventurous dilettante. Neither was Mrs. Fazakerly exactly like a violoncello, she was more like a piano; while Miss Tancred, from the Colonel's point of view, was like a hurdy-gurdy. Not a difficult instrument the hurdy-gurdy; you have only to keep on turning a handle to make it go. To be sure, you can ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... my studies with a regular vocal teacher, but with a dilettante—I do not know just how you say that in English. This gentleman was not a professional; he was a business man who at the same time was a good musician. Instead of starting me with a lot of scales and exercises, ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... Mrs. Quentyns and Judy through the different rooms: he was an art connoisseur himself, and even dabbled in paint in a dilettante sort of fashion. He drew Judy on to make remarks, laughed and quizzed her for some ideas which he considered in advance of the times, for others which were altogether too antiquated for him to ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the host had thrown off his habitual air of grave reserve, and, responding to the friendly and congenial atmosphere around him, expanded to a gayety, a magnetic boyishness, that fascinated as much as it amazed the four who knew him as no others could; and sent Avelallement, a wealthy German dilettante, whose acquaintance with the famous Russian consisted of a long correspondence and a fanatical admiration of his work, back to his native Hamburg determined on bringing Ivan to Germany, in order that the most sentimental, hospitable and musical race in the world might come to ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... of Emperor Joseph, and may draw attention to the habit prevalent in Saxony and other neighbouring countries with an originally strongly Slav population of displaying a birch-tree at the beginning of May. The learned will then dive down into Slavonic mythology, which process to the dilettante in such matters, is like "going in off the deep end"—you never know when or where you may come ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... live a very short time. We live only one life. Only certain things are possible to us. The man who tries to crowd everything into that life fails. He is a dilettante. He may find pleasure but he reaches no end. He strikes no long sustained note. In the eyes of those who come after him, he ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts which strew the highways of political life. But we can recognize real conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but now and then in the midst of his most serious thought some absurd or grotesque image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the lines on the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce epitaph of the Dean of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the room at the right of the door upon entering the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... tipped off for us most of the really dangerous men, and it was not her fault a few of them escaped. But we've all been working both tides under, King. Take me; this is my first night in bed in three, and here I am awake! No—nothing personal—glad to see you, but please understand. And I'm a leisured dilettante compared to most of the others. She must have known our fix. She shouldn't ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... political duties, the affairs of state, economic problems, some adjustment of our relations that shall lighten and relieve the wrongs and misery everywhere apparent; is the interest in intellectual pursuits and art (except in a dilettante way dictated for a season by fashion) in books, in the wide range of mental pleasures which make men superior to the accidents of fortune? Or is the interest of this class, for the most part, with some noble exceptions, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a naturalist and a bit of a sportsman. Glad of a ride through the jungle on an elephant. Glad of his board and lodging. Bit of a student he thinks himself in his dilettante, Parisian way. Oh, ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... "I've been dilettante all my life," was one of his confessions. "I've traveled; I've studied in a tepid sort of fashion; I went through college without any idea of doing anything with what I got; I had a sort of pride in keeping up with my fellows; and I had no idea of preparing for any work in the world. Then ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... artisan, artificer, craftsman, handicraftsman, journeyman, mechanic, workman, laborer, operative, industrial. Antonyms: idler, drone, dabbler, sluggard, truant, dilettante, loafer, shirker. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... was the courtier, the artistic idler, the dilettante in the art of luxurious living; and Payne, conscious of his dirt-smudged overalls, envied him the elegance with which he played the role. That Garman was interested in the crudities of business seemed an improbability; that he was connected with things ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... absolutely every man free to become an artist, provided he were willing to suffer a certain economic loss. This would not deter those in whom the impulse was strong and genuine, but would tend to exclude the dilettante. Many young artists at present endure voluntarily much greater poverty than need be entailed by only doing half the usual day's work in a well-organized Socialist community; and some degree of hardship is not objectionable, as a ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... with the impetuosity of daemonic natures; and both left the impress of their individuality stamped indelibly upon their age. Julius, in all things grandiose, resolved to signalise his reign by great buildings, great sculpture, great pictorial schemes. There was nothing of the dilettante and collector about him. He wanted creation at a rapid rate and in enormous quantities. To indulge this craving, he gathered round him a band of demigods and Titans, led by Bramante, Raffaello, Michelangelo, and enjoyed the spectacle of a new world of art arising at his bidding through ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the jealous and often treacherous patronage of Rome, left his dominions at his death to the Republic. He had begun his reign by massacring all his father's friends and their families, and ended it as an amateur gardener and dilettante modeller in wax; so perhaps the malice of insanity had something to do with the bequest, if indeed it was not a forgery. Aristonicus, a natural son of a previous king, Eumenes II., set it at naught and aspired to ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... Charles Douglas, had returned from the auto-da-fe. Like his friend George Selwyn—friend these many years by correspondence only—Mr. Langton was a dilettante in executions and like horrors, and had taken Lord Charles to the show, to initiate him. He reported that they had left Sir Oliver in a press of the crowd, themselves hurrying away on foot. He would doubtless arrive in a few minutes. Mr. Langton ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... small for its shell.' The place breathed imbecility, and unreality, and sleepy life-in- death, while the whole nineteenth century went roaring on its way outside. And as Lancelot thought, though only as a dilettante, of old St. Paul's, the morning star and focal beacon of England through centuries and dynasties, from old Augustine and Mellitus, up to those Paul's Cross sermons whose thunders shook thrones, and to noble Wren's masterpiece of art, he asked, 'Whither ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... world: you shall never talk long and not hear the name of Bully Hayes, a naval hero whose exploits and deserved extinction left Europe cold; commerce will be touched on, copra, shell, perhaps cotton or fungus; but in a far-away, dilettante fashion, as by men not deeply interested; through all, the names of schooners and their captains, will keep coming and going, thick as may-flies; and news of the last shipwreck will be placidly exchanged and debated. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... liked your interest in them. He is a good, kind-hearted dilettante sort of old man; he has got all the talk of the literary, cultivated society in London, and must ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... may be roughly divided into classes, thus: First—The adult student who, on rare occasions, calls to supplement the resources of his own collection of books with the resources of the public institution. This class is very small. Second—The dilettante, or amateur, who is getting up an essay or a criticism for some club or society, and wishes to verify his impression as to the color of James Russell Lowell's hair, or the exact words Dickens once ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... young composer was unsuccessful in his attempts to break through the barren and irritating drudgery of a schoolmaster's life. At last a wealthy young dilettante, Franz von Schober, who had become an admirer of Schubert's songs, persuaded his mother to offer him a fixed home in her house. The latter gratefully accepted the overture of friendship, and thence became a daily guest at ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... intelligence and education, the charm of a man who prides himself upon his Italian and French, upon his knowledge of books and pictures, and his capacity for holding his own in any group, on any subject. He was quite frankly a collector, a connoisseur, a dilettante in a hundred different directions, and he had had leisure all his life to develop and perfect his affectations. In all this new world Norma could not perhaps have discovered a man more rich in just what would impress her ignorance, her ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... attention, while a Coterie of Gentlemen and Noblemen and Ladies entertained themselves with getting up Plays, and acting them at the Duke of Richmond's house, Whitehall. Lee's 'Theodosius' was the favorite. Lord Henry Fitzgerald played Varanus very well,—for a Dilettante; and Lord Derby did his part surprisingly. But there was a song to be sung to Athenais, while she, resolving to take poison, sits in a musing attitude. Jane Holman—then Hamilton—would sing an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Appleton was no dilettante; his interest in the subject was serious and abiding. He did not wear his art as he did his gloves, nor did he turn it into an intellectual abstraction. There was nothing he disliked more than the kind ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... is the tramp?" Who is the walking person seen from the vantage ground of these pages? He is necessarily a masked figure; he wears the disguise of one who has escaped, and also of one who is a conspirator. He is not the dilettante literary person gone tramping, nor the pauper vagabond who writes sonnets, though either of these roles may be part of his disguise. He is not merely something negligible or accidental or ornamental, he is something real and true, the product of his ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... the best musicians.... Do you know, I think Blanche is the one man who has made a successful profession of being an amateur—unless one excepts Robert de la Condamine.... You can scarcely call a man who does so much a dilettante. Yes, I think he is an amateur ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the direction of refinement left it to second-rate writers. It became enervated instead of elevated. The epic and the tragic poetry, ceasing to reflect the really powerful impulses of the day, were left to the connoisseur and dilettante man of taste, and though they could write with force and dignity when renovating or imitating older masterpieces, such literature became effete and hopelessly artificial. It was at best a display of technical skill, and could not correspond to the strongest passions and conditions ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... nevertheless obvious that an idle and luxurious class exists in this country, and that it is less exempt than in our own from the reproach of preferring inglorious ease to the furtherance of liberal ideas. It is rapidly increasing, and I am not sure that the indefinite growth of the dilettante spirit, in connection with large and lavishly-expended wealth, is an unmixed good, even in a society in which freedom of development has obtained so many interesting triumphs. The fact that this body is not represented in the governing class, is perhaps ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... which is considered one of the finest positions for a man or woman in Finland. And it is scientific teaching, for they learn how to impart knowledge to others, instead of doing it in a dilatory and dilettante manner, as ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... field Bob, like the dilettante and unstable dog he was, gave it up, and sauntered off to scratch at a rabbit-hole with an insufferable air of suggesting that that was what he had come out for all the time. I continued to pound along doggedly. ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... even in the filing of papers at every American relief society. That and the new sensation of work serves to hold the dilettante of our country to his long task. "This is the president's office," you will be told in a hushed voice outside some stately door. Then one discovers in Mr. President a playmate of Mayfair or Monte Carlo or Taormina who may ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... there was poetry and there were politics. The poetry justified the politics; moreover, was their inspiration. A dilettante such as Jacqueline, aesthetic and delicately sensitive, was naturally a lover of the beautiful in her search after emotions. A sentiment for her surroundings came now as a matter of course. If she turned, she ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... passion has grown upon me since I broke my own hip bone and know what it means," the old man went on. "With the help of my fellow-student there, from a mere dilettante I became a practised surgeon; and, what is more, I am one of those who serve Esculapius at my own expense. However, there are accessory reasons for which I have chosen such strange companions: deformed slaves are cheap and besides that, certain investigations afford me inestimable and peculiar ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... above the world. The term "My Beloved" is singularly universal, and seems to spring involuntarily to the lips of the lover when his love is of the quality that reverences; adores; and exalts its object. And it is equally foreign to the lips of the dilettante lover. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... reached the parting of the ways. She saw that her life was becoming an empty husk. I think the theater was palling on her. But I see now that she still cherished the dream of winning the man she loved—not me, her husband, but that handsome dilettante, Grant. I take it, therefore, that she went to Steynholme to determine whether or not the glamour of the past was really dead. Unfortunately, she witnessed certain idyllic passages between her one-time lover and a charming village girl. Imagine the ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... naked on the sands of the Sahara beneath the stars while celebrating the sacred rites of their festivals, but it soon became apparent that, all with few exceptions, were mere novices in comparison, and stood in about the same relation to her as a dilettante does to ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... favour of the Emperor. His recommendation, for in fact it was and could be only that, was quite in keeping with the traditions of his office and the people's own view of royal government. The speech, as was admitted, was suggested by no mere dilettante's vanity, but, as is evident from his words at the Art Museum, by the conviction that just as it is the imperial duty to provide an efficient army and navy, so it is the imperial duty to use every personal and private, as well ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... after he ate his supper he still bore the outward appearance of an assistant cutter, though inwardly he felt a premonitory glow. After half-past seven, however, he buttoned on a low, turned-down collar with its concomitant broad Windsor tie, and therewith he assumed his real character—that of a dilettante. ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... commanded his attention. Checking his walk, he stood regarding it: and his heart went out to the kindly old man in a quite unusual wave of sympathetic understanding. He saw himself—the "damned unsatisfactory son," Bohemian and dilettante, frankly at odds with the Sinclair tradition—now standing, more or less, in that father's shoes; his heart centred on the old place and on the boy for whom he held it in trust; and the irony of it twisted his lips into a rueful smile. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... When he had finished, Liza praised the motive, Marya Dmitrievna said: "It is charming;"—while Gedeonovsky even shouted: "Ravishing! both poetry and harmony are equally ravishing!..." Lyenotchka, with childish adoration, gazed at the singer. In a word, the composition of the youthful dilettante pleased all present extremely; but outside of the door of the drawing-room, in the anteroom, stood an elderly man, who had just arrived, to whom, judging by the expression of his downcast face and the movement of his shoulders, Panshin's romance, charming as it ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... problems, possible solutions, suggested questions, and proffered answers. But then they are at large, without cohesion, and very apt to be the objects even in the more instructed minds of not much more than dilettante interest. We see in solution an immense number of notions, which people think it quite unnecessary to precipitate in the form of convictions. We constantly hear the age lauded for its tolerance, for its candour, for its openness of mind, for ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... instance of this nearness of the boy to the surface in him displayed itself one grey east-windy afternoon at Leven, when one saw quite another side to him than the literary and dilettante one displayed, with something of a mannered affectation, the day before in 'The Turret' drawing-room. He had walked down to the sands with his aunt and there were assembled various younger members of the Balfour clique, and some whom age and sex ought perhaps to have ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... calculating cynicism of middle-age, or his heart corroded by the shallow, fashionable egotism of our day, and he felt no hesitation about doing his duty. Fortunately also, for him, he was no mere dreamer, or idle dilettante. Had he been so, he would have hesitated, like Hamlet, and let irresolution mar his purpose. But he was essentially practical. Life to him meant action, rather than thought. He had that rarest of all ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... got over my amazement, when the writer himself overtook me at my hotel. For a moment I scarcely recognized him. A new suit of fashionably-cut clothes had changed him, without, however, entirely concealing his rustic angularity of figure and outline. He even affected a fashionable dilettante air, but so mildly and so innocently that it ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... reading we have fallen into a fireside, dilettante culture of ideas as an intellectual pleasure. Amos and Isaiah do not deal in ideas. Their strength lies in love and hatred, in the keenness and depth of their division between right and wrong. They repeat the work of God the Creator: chaotic sameness ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... a sudden passion leaped to Ralph's lips. "Ah, that's wilful, that's unworthy of you! You were not meant to be measured in that way—you were meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante!" ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... glanced at the speaker a little curiously. He had known Julian since he was a boy but had never regarded him as anything but a dilettante. ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lumber rooms of the "Neues Palais" at Potsdam, and recently published after being edited by Professor Spitta, proves that the royal patron of Voltaire, and the founder of Prussia's military power was no mere dilettante, but a real genius in the art of composition. Prince Louis Ferdinand, the son of Frederick the Great's brother, who courted and met with a premature death at Saalfeld, while rashly engaging the French ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... he practised. Some of the patterns he produced are delightful, but they are without imagination, without passion, without joy in the material and visible world—the dainty diversions of a dilettante. One is glad that so gracefully slender an art should exist, but if it has seemed great art to us it is because our age is so poor in anything better. To rank its creator with the abounding masters of the ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox |
