"Dilettantism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doctrine about Aselgeia. In fact, although the lecture is the most thoughtful, the most serious in part, the most forcible, and the truest of all Mr Arnold's political or social discourses, yet it shares with all of them the reproach of a touch of desultory dilettantism. ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... that can part with him in declared enmity? Let us confess, there is that in the wild, much-suffering, much-inflicting man, which almost attaches us. His attitude, we will hope and believe, is that of a man who had said to Cant, Begone; and to Dilettantism, Here thou canst not be; and to Truth, Be thou in place of all to me: a man who had manfully defied the "Time-Prince," or Devil, to his face; nay perhaps, Hannibal-like, was mysteriously consecrated from birth to that warfare, and now stood minded ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... his own eyes and looks down on others. Having all his sympathies educated in one way, they die out in every other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow, and intolerant bigot. Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there is a certain form of dilettantism to which no one can object. It is this that we want among our students. We wish them to abandon no subject until they have seen and felt its merit—to act under a general interest in all branches of knowledge, not a commercial eagerness to ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... war. For the ordinary purposes of the domestic life of the country the system has its advantages, but they are coupled with grave drawbacks. The party system destroys the sincerity of our political life, and introduces a dangerous dilettantism into ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... door, resting his paw on the escutcheon ornamented with the national lys. The appearance of that front did not justify the choice which the elegant Dorsenne had made of the place at which to dine when he did not dine in society. But his dilettantism liked nothing better than those sudden leaps from society, and M. Egiste Brancadori, who kept the Marzocco, was one of those unconscious buffoons of whom he was continually in search in real life, one of those whom he called his "Thebans", in reference to King Lear. "I'll talk a word with this same ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... then, that love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other countries, and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in defence of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian dilettantism which repels me in the very depths of my being. No! Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love their country, but rather that I should honour them, and seek to unite ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... has carried this dilettantism, this playing with serious ideas into science, into literature, into politics, and into everything which it is not too lazy to go into, and with its dilettantism has introduced, too, its coldness, its boredom, and its one-sidedness and, as it seems to me, it has already succeeded in developing ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... probably was laid in Etruria, even in early times, for that insipid accumulation of learned lumber, particularly of a theological and astrological nature, by virtue of which afterwards, when amidst the general decay antiquarian dilettantism began to flourish, the Tuscans divided with the Jews, Chaldeans, and Egyptians the honour of being admired as primitive sources of divine wisdom. We know still less, if possible, of Sabellian art; but that of course by no means warrants the inference that it was inferior to that of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... one cannot help feeling, while reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier," puts into the mouth of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in England, during Elizabeth's reign, the practical weakness of Neoplatonism was compensated by the noble practical life which men were compelled to live in those great times; by the strong hold which they ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... temperament of the great humorists, under whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism. The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though he warns us that our civilisation is not near its meridian, but as yet only in the cock-crowing ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... kind, without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece, or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism[496] in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of woodcraft and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for would take ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... bearing of the man of action, whose hands have kept his head, contrasting sharply with the Miner's heavy and tentative slowness, the awkward self-consciousness of the Easy One, the Objector's furtive and apprehensive manner, or the Near-Collegian's languid affectation of dilettantism. ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... said Pollyooly doubtfully. To her firm spirit the idea of working in gloves savoured of dilettantism. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... "Sahifah" vous etes encore en erreur. Mon etymologie est acceptee par tout le monde et je vous renvoie a Fleischer, Kleinre Schriften, p. 468, Leipzig, 1885, ou vous trouverez ['instruction necessaire. Le dilettantism qui se trahit dans tout ce que vous ecrivez vous fait faire de telles erreurs. Nous autres arabisants et professo (?) nous ne vous avons jamais et nous ne vous pouvons jamais considerer comme arabisant. Voila ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton |
