"Dilettante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... complains of his want of energy and artistic tastes, but allows him "to travel indefinitely." He remains abroad ten years studying art, comes home and paints an amateurish portrait of his father, marries and has a family, but continues a dilettante, never quite abandoning his art, but working at it fitfully. He does nothing especially clever, but never says anything that is not clever, and is as much admired as he is beloved. At heart he is true, however cynical may be his words, and throughout he is the gentleman ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... that the mere dilettante and the amateur ruralist may as well keep their hands off. The prize is not for them. He who would successfully strive for it must be himself what he sings,—part and parcel of the rural life of New England,—one ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... has more sympathy with a Khalif than with a Colonel. He dwells in the romantic regions of life; but the romance is real. The hope is a true hope. The dream is a true dream. The picture is a painting, and not a chromo. The love is a passion, and not a dilettante episode. Cawein's art is a genuine art. His verse is exquisite. Out of the three hundred and thirteen poems in the five volumes under consideration there may be found hardly a false or broken harmony...."—JOHN CLARK RIDPATH, LL.D., ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... practical fruit. In the year 930, the Emperor Daigo died and was succeeded by his son Shujaku, a child of eight, whose mother was a daughter of Fujiwara Mototsune. In accordance with the system now fully established, Fujiwara Tadahira became regent. History depicts this Tadahira as an effeminate dilettante, one of whose foibles was to have a cuckoo painted on his fan and to imitate the cry of the bird whenever he opened it. But as representative of the chief aristocratic family in an age when to be a Fujiwara was to possess a title superior to that conferred by ability in any form and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... sick of the dilettante middle class, and mean to try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts. You will be with me, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... a pious deed, of course," said Lancaster, stroking his moustache, not in the dilettante style of De Echingham, but like a man lost in thought. "It seems a pity, though, ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... Gedeonovsky went so far as to exclaim, "Ravishing poetry, and music equally ravishing!" Lenotchka looked with childish reverence at the singer. In short, every one present was delighted with the young dilettante's composition; but at the door leading into the drawing-room from the hall stood an old man, who had only just come in, and who, to judge by the expression of his downcast face and the shrug of his shoulders, was by no means pleased with Panshin's song, pretty though it was. After waiting a moment ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... generally agreed. The Conservatives, though profoundly chagrined at the trick fate had played upon them, looked forward with pleasurable expectation to the revenge that would be theirs when Laurier, political dilettante and amateur, took up the burden that had been too great for their own Ulysses. They foresaw a Laurier regime which for futility and brevity would take its place in history with the ill-starred prime ministership of Mackenzie. The average Liberal felt that the government, which ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... Lord 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. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... frequenter of cultured society pleads in these pages the attractions of an intellectual bias or life-training: he pleads to all accessible classes—to the curate and to the nobleman, "to a country gentleman who regretted that his son had the tendencies of a dilettante," "to a lady of high culture who found it difficult to associate with persons of her own sex," and so on. Over seventy different addresses are included, each in the form of a letter, which, though not necessarily ever ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... artist, to which habit had added a bookish touch, ending in a tout ensemble of gentleness and distinction with little apparent affinity to a scene like that in the 'Traveller's Rest.' But there are many whom a suspicion of the dilettante in such an exterior belies, and Narcissus was one of them. He had very strongly developed that instinct of manner to which sympathy is a daily courtesy, and he thus readily, when it suited him, could take the complexion of his company, and his capacity ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... chiefly and traditionally Protestant, probably sympathized with Prussia more than with Austria, although the Elector himself was Catholic,—that inglorious monarch who resembled in his gallantries Louis XV., and in his dilettante tastes Leo X. He is chiefly known for the number of his concubines and his Dresden ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... new piece, the last of seven, for 'tis The custom now to represent that number. 'Tis written by a Dilettante, and The actors who perform are Dilettanti; 410 Excuse me, gentlemen; but I must vanish. I ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... extracted from a real sermon (by the Jesuit Santa Clara) of the period it refers to.—There were various Jesuits Santa Clara, of that period: this is the German one, Abraham by name; specimens of whose Sermons, a fervent kind of preaching-run-mad, have been reprinted in late years, for dilettante purposes, (Note ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... for a girl of her age, and was improving all the time, but the trip over the sea seemed as far off as a trip to the moon. Toinette was somewhat of a dilettante, and pottered away with her water-colors with more or less success. But she admired good work, and was quick to see that Helen was a hard student, and to respect her for it. Although so unlike in disposition, as well as position, ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the pulpit, the becoming vestment and the embroidered stole, which we are learning gradually to look upon as attributes of the British curate. So perfect, indeed, is the imitation that the excellence of her work may perhaps defeat its own purpose; and the lacquered imitation of woman, "dilettante, delicate-handed," as Tennyson saw and sang of him, may satisfy the world, and for long ages prevent any anxious inquiry ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... in this matter will have the same sort of experience as the recruit in the army who is compelled to learn walking after having walked almost all his life as a dilettante or empiricist. It is a hard time: one almost fears that the tendons are going to snap and one ceases to hope that the artificial and consciously acquired movements and positions of the feet will ever be carried out with ease and comfort. It is painful to see how awkwardly ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... natural defects, from the pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous cultivation of manner, he was saved by the consciousness that he had a matter to present, very real, [103] at least to him. That preoccupation of the dilettante with what might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things as really being, with important results, thus, rather than thus,—intuitions ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... was accepted?" murmured Straws. "Discerning Tortier! Excellent dilettante! Let him henceforth be known as a man of taste!" Here the poet critically examined the bottle. "Nothing vapid, thin or characterless there!" he added, holding it before the blaze in the grate. "Positively I'll dedicate my forthcoming book to him. 'To that worshipful master and patron, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Gaetano, "I did not think you so passionate a dilettante. You exceed me—to pay for music with gold is well enough, but with life—ah, that is altogether a different thing; mine is valuable, and I keep it for ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Hambleton fortune, and a little later I became counsel for the Crescent Gas and Electric Company, in which he had shrewdly gained a controlling interest. Even toward the colossal game of modern finance his attitude was characteristically that of the dilettante, of the amateur; he played it, as it were, contemptuously, even as he had played poker at Harvard, with a cynical audacity that had a peculiarly disturbing effect upon his companions. He bluffed, he raised the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... are of the same opinion, and not long ago one of them remarked that it would be difficult to find a more perfect type of a patrician head. As to his scientific career, my father is and remains a cultured and gifted nobleman-dilettante. I almost believe dilettantism to be the fate of all Ploszowskis, to which I will refer later on, when I come to write about myself. As to my father, there is in his desk a yellow manuscript about Triplicity in Nature. I perused it, and it did not interest me. I only remember a comparison ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... to put my eyes on the 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 ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... pictures from worn-out books or advertisements, which Ethel was colouring—Aubrey volunteering aid that was received rather distrustfully, as his love of effect caused him to array the model school-children in colours gaudy enough, as Gertrude complained, 'to corrupt a saint.' Nor was his dilettante help more appreciated at a small stand, well provided with tiny drawers, and holding a shaded lamp, according to Gertrude, 'burning something horrible ending in gen, that would kill anybody but Tom, who managed it,' but which threw ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have filled him with culture, whilst a distaste for serious effort, whether mental or physical, and an innate capacity for mastering no subject thoroughly will have produced in him that special refinement which is to the Dilettante as a trade-stamp to Britannia metal. In after-life, he will speak with regretful fondness, and with an accuracy which he fails to apply to other matters of his "days" (four in number) at a German University, and will submit with cheerfulness to the reputation of having drunk deep from the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... was the 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; ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... 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
... admired on all sides, especially teaching, 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 so ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... but secret and dilettante policy was that we suggested to the Entente a willingness to separate from our Allies, and lost our position in the struggle for a separate peace. For we saw that in separating from Germany we could not escape being crippled; that, ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... She did not perceive that he had undertaken that journey in imitation of the other—perhaps in the hope of finding in those distant, hard places the secret of Lawrence Teck's attractiveness. And, in fact, he looked stronger in spirit as well as in body. The hypochondriac, the timid dilettante, seemed to have slunk away; in his place stood a man who had forced himself, against all his natural instincts, to endure extremes of cold and heat, dirt and famine, hardship and danger. Even now his face was calm; but he could ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Marina, with its huge serpent of lights, the street singers and players were making their nightly pilgrimage, pausing, wherever they saw a lighted window or a dark figure on a balcony, to play and sing the tunes of which they were weary long ago. On the wall, high above the sea, were dotted the dilettante fishermen with their long rods and lines. And below, before each stone staircase that descended to the water, was a waiting boat, and in the moonlight rose up the loud cry of "Barca! Barca!" to attract the attention of ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... 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 of pretension which tries ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... easy frankness, said that it seemed to him as absurd as if Hugh had expressed the intention of devoting the rest of his life to practising the piano or drawing in water-colours. Hugh was quite aware that his literary position was of a dilettante kind, and that he had done nothing to justify the hope that success in literature was within his reach. He pleaded that the service of the State was encumbered by a mass of unnecessary detail, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... on each foot he'd had a slipper To Troukachevsky (who was saved) The husband would have p'rhaps behaved Much in the style of Jack the Ripper. He put to flight the dilettante (Who hadn't finished half the andante), But feared the servants' mockings Should they see him in his stockings, Racing along the corridor:— Not that he thought it horrid, or Harsh to transfix him with a dagger, (He could not bear the fiddler's swagger), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... 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, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... publicity is that we cannot enjoy our own ideas, unless we can impress people 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 vulgarity of his attitude ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he was projecting through Holland and Belgium, and which was to land him finally in the Austrian Tyrol. He would work his way later to Rome and Florence and Venice, and he would keep Norway for the following year; and he would travel about in the desultory, dilettante sort of fashion that suited him best now. He would probably go to America, and see Niagara and all the wonders of the New World, that was so young and fresh in its immensity. Indeed, he would go anywhere and everywhere, until his trouble became a thing of the ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... 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 ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... toilet, his music, his wall-papers, his drawing and embroidering—specimens of the last he exhibited with great success at various shows held by Arts and Crafts Guilds, and such-like high and artistic fellowships—his sweet-peas, his chrysanthemums, his postage stamps, his dilettante reading and his mild social engagements, filled most satisfyingly the hours not claimed by slumber. Now and then appointments with his tailor summoned him to London. He stayed at the same mildewed old family hotel ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... 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 the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... The dilettante has conical hands, with small, tapering fingers; this is the hand which is popularly supposed to accompany artistic temperament. He loves art. He appreciates art. He may even win fame and fortune as a competent critic of art, but he cannot create it. Your true artist ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... continued quiet work after the strikes were over, first showed the public that there was power and meaning in this new development, this new spirit among the most oppressed women workers. The attitude of the League also convinced labor men that this was no dilettante welfare society, but absolutely fair and square with the labor movement. The Chicago League, after helping in the same way in the garment-workers' strike which is now in its fifth year, contributed towards bringing about the agreement ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... them "inferno-human beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... largely out of the material supplied by ordinary London suburban society and by the rather less usual society of cranks and enthusiasts so plentiful at the end of the nineteenth century. He has written in the Autobiography of the artistic and dilettante groups where everyone discussed religion and no one practised it, of the Christian Socialists and other societies into which he and Cecil found their way, and of some of the friendships they formed. Among these one of the closest was with ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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
... the literary activity in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. But in spite of his interesting personality and genius, he has had to wait until the present time for full appreciation. To his own age he may have appeared as a literary dilettante, who tried his hand at several forms of writing, and being outshone by the more excellent in each field, gave up the attempt and turned to the practice of medicine. This profession engaged him for the last twenty-five ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... of old ale or linger to gaze upon a sympathetic face; but he refused to pamper such feelings, still more to simulate them; he refused to allow himself to become the creature of literary or poetic ecstasy; he refused to indulge in the fashionable debauch of dilettante melancholy. He wrote about his life quite naturally, "as if there were nothing in it." Another and closely allied cause of perplexity and discontent to the literary connoisseurs was Borrow's lack of style. By style, in the generation of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Dickens and George Eliot, was ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... about to recommence;—the play Will be the last of seven, and spick-span new—' 'Tis usual here that number to present. A dilettante did the piece invent, And dilettanti will enact it too. Excuse me, gentlemen; to me's assign'd As dilettante to ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... value of notes (musical ones) has seized a Parisian dilettante, who, according to the Furet de Londres, has been fixing the price of every note and rest in certain pieces played by Paganini recently, at a concert given at the Opera at Paris, which produced him 16,500 francs. The following is the result:—He performed, during the evening, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... round of conventional pleasures which the reader and his humble servant have mixed in deeply or dilettante, according to his taste or capacity for such giddy work. There was withal the usual heart-burning, heart-bartering, heart—anything you will but breaking. For we have not breaking hearts among us to-day. Providence, it would seem, ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... than art, and that was nature. Nature showed him here her rarest and divinest beauty; and if in the presence of such beauty as that—beauty which glowed in immortal lineaments wherever he turned his eyes—if before this he slighted the lesser beauties of art, he might be sneered at by the mere dilettante, but the emotions of his own soul were none the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... 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 ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... he pursued his meditations, 'that art did not satisfy her, did not fill the void in her life. Real artists exist only for art, for the theatre.... Everything else is pale beside what they regard as their vocation.... She was a dilettante.' ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... 'naivety', now appear as 'levee', and 'naivete'. The next step is to italicize these words, thus treating them as complete aliens, and thus we often see role, depot, &c. The very old English word 'rendezvous' is now printed rendezvous, and 'dilettante' and 'vogue' sometimes are printed in italics. Among other words which have been borrowed at various times and more or less naturalized, but which are now being driven out of the language, are the following: confrere, congee, cortege, dishabille, distrait, ensemble, fete, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... returning home, we are told, laden with silks and oriental stuffs for the adornment of his chamber and his person. He was frequently in debt and still more frequently in disgrace with the Queen and with his father-in-law. Dilettante, aesthete, and euphuist, he would naturally attract the Oxford fop, and that Lyly attached himself to his clique disposes, in my mind at least, of all theories of his puritanical tendencies. Certainly a Nonconformist conscience could not have flourished ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... eccentric like Godwin." Shelley would be employing the strict rationalism of the older and stronger free thinkers, if he answered, "From what I observe of your mind, you are rushing on destruction in marrying the great-niece of an old corpse of a courtier and dilettante like Samuel Rogers." It is only opinion for opinion. Nobody can pretend that either Mary Godwin or Samuel Rogers was mad; and the general view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their blood or type is simply the same sort of general view by ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... for I was culpably slow in throwing any small influence I may possess into the scale of truth. I might have drifted on for my whole life as a psychical Researcher, showing a sympathetic, but more or less dilettante attitude towards the whole subject, as if we were arguing about some impersonal thing such as the existence of Atlantis or the Baconian controversy. But the War came, and when the War came it brought earnestness into all ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... morning." Meredith does not fly into a passion, like Carlyle, because society is sentimental and shallow and loves to pose. He proceeds in the coolest manner to draw with unusual distinctness the shallow dilettante, the sentimentalist, the egotist, and the hypocrite. By placing these characters in the midst of men and women actuated by simple and genuine motives, he develops situations that seem especially humorous to readers who are alert to detect incongruity. This veiled ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... why men have, as a rule, better manners than women, though they are far less polite. A man respects the judgment of a specialist on any given subject, and he is rather intolerant of the snap judgments of the dabbler or the dilettante. He listens, if forced to, with unconcealed impatience to the babbling of his pretty neighbor at table about art, perhaps, or engineering, or some other topic concerning which her ignorance is as profound ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... has turned out a dilettante instead of an African explorer. I heard he was a minister. He does not seem to have much ambition even in that line of life. I should think Armstrong had got the right kind of place for him. He was a good fellow, but never had much practical ability. You say very little about Clay. How ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... favourable judgment on some parts of the piece, but other parts, notably the meeting of Rinaldo with Armida, and the violent birth of their love, are depicted by the author with real poetic fire. As is the case with all such works, which are in reality always hampered by the superficiality of the dilettante, much should have been altered and rewritten for stage effect. Karl would not hear of this; on the contrary, he thought he had discovered, in an intelligent theatrical manager in Stettin, the very man who would lay aside any such considerations as were peculiar ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... 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 becomes diverse; the heavenly firmament ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... 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 to ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... man of letters, though, it may be pleaded, he has done so from a strong conviction on his part that his duty lay the other way, and that it was high time literature should, regardless of merely dilettante aestheticism, address itself to exposing, by depicting it, the extent to which the evil genius is gnawing at and corroding the vitals of society; and it is not for a moment to be supposed he has done so from any pleasure he ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... his 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 Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... it all is that I don't do much more than to stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the scores. For I am—no false modesty, Friend Severin; you can lie to others, but you don't quite succeed any longer in lying to yourself—I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at present secure for their masters the income of a cabinet minister, or even that of ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... 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 ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... imposing and sacerdotal of bishops; but in private life none knew better how to disguise his cloth. He was moreover a man of parts, and from the construction of a Latin hexameter to the growing of a Holland bulb, had a word worth hearing on all subjects likely to engage the dilettante. A liking soon sprang up between Odo and this versatile prelate; and in the retirement of his lordship's cabinet, or pacing with him the garden-alleys set with ancient marbles, the young man gathered many precepts of that philosophy of pleasure which the great churchmen ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of a letter to Francesco Melzi, born l493—a youth therefore of about 17 in 1510. Leonardo addresses his young friend as "Messer", as being the son of a noble house. Melzi practised art under Leonardo as a dilettante and not as a pupil, like Cesare da Sesto and others (See LERMOLIEFF, Die Galerien ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... narrow 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. To a stranger, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... met upon the street; Quick passion sprung into the eye of each; No dilettante heat! For though I do not love her now, beseech You, signor, do you think We could face so in any spot, nor fear To leap the fatal brink Into each other's arms—that, once a-near, Hell's self could make ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... bit of 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
... Miss 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 ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Howart Penny, in the days when men wore powder and the Penny forge had just been started in what was then a British colony; the next, Jasper, involved in a murder trial in the sixties; and; last of the black Pennys, another Howart, in whom the family energy has thinned to a dilettante appreciation of the arts, dying alone amongst his collections. You can see from this outline that the book is incidentally liable to confound the skipper, who may find himself confronted with (apparently) the same character tying a periwig on one page and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... 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 ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... to see old Maurice again—he was looking brown and less dilettante—though his socks and tie and eyes matched as well as ever! He congratulated me on the improvement in health in myself too, and then he gave me all ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... to repent of his too easy taking of matters in the beginning. Not that he had a suspicion of Rex, but that he had remembered that Dick was always a loose fish. The even current of the dilettante's life became disturbed. He grew pale and hollow-eyed. His digestion was impaired. He ceased to take the interest in china which the importance of that article demanded. In a word, he grew despondent as to his fitness ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... remorse at not having saved the soul so weak of that defenseless child. Ah, I do not mince the truth to myself, and I shall not do so to you. You remember the morning when you were so gay, and when you gave me the theory of your cosmopolitanism? It amused you, as a perfect dilettante, so you said, to assist in one of those dramas of race which bring into play the personages from all points of the earth and of history, and you then traced to me a programme very true, my faith, and which events have almost brought about. Madame Steno has indeed conducted ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... 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 ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... appearance. The despised Mr. Stocks was the real worker. She had laughed at his incessant solemnity as the badge of a fool, and adored Lewis's light-heartedness as the true air of the great. But she had been mistaken. Things were what they seemed. The light-hearted was the half-hearted, "the wandering dilettante," Mr. Stocks had called him, "the worst type of the pseudo-culture of our universities." She told herself she hated the whole affectation of breeding and chivalry. Those men—Lewis and his friends—were always kind ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... 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, ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... what he is? He might be an artist, but he doesn't seem quite like an artist; or just a dilettante, but he doesn't look in the least like a dilettante. Or he might be an architect; I think that is the most probable guess of all. Perhaps he is only 'going to be' one of these things, for he can't be more than twenty-five or twenty-six. Still, ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... day there was a doubt about him; it is expressed in the young Michelangelo's sudden taunt that he could not cast the statue he had modelled. Michelangelo was one of those who see in life always the great task to be performed and who judge a man by his performance; to him Leonardo was a dilettante, a talker; he made monuments, but Leonardo remains his own monument, a prophecy of what man shall be when he comes into his kingdom. With him, we must confess, it is more promise than performance; he could ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... behoof and that of Lakeland: if he keep his word as to me, he may do as much for you, or more. Copies are at Cambridge; among the Oxonians too; I have with stingy discretion distributed all my copies but two. Old Rogers, a grim old Dilettante, full of sardonic sense, was heard saying, "It is German Poetry given out in American Prose." Friend Emerson ought to be content;—and has now above all things, as I said, to be in no haste. Slow fire does make ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... midst 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
... intellect, could forego the endless, killing effort to make himself attractive. And this delight in being a lover, in living by love alone, of the reality of which he was inclined to be doubtful, the price which, in the long run, he must pay for it, as a dilettante in immaterial sensations, enhanced its value in his eyes—as one sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable, become convinced that they are, as also of the rare quality and absolute detachment ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... were to be got up; and then, when I had got out of Merlin-land, and assured myself I was human by eating lunch, I was to meet a goodly company of distinguished folk—great poets, and one or two more mystic painters, a dilettante duke, and the nameless crowd of worshippers who would come to sit at the feet of all these, and sigh adoringly, and shake their heads over the Philistinism of English society. I don't care for ugly mediaeval maidens myself, nor for allegorical ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... address himself more eagerly to reap what artistic harvest Rome offers, which is reckoned the peculiar produce of Rome among cities under the sun; to all galleries, churches, sistine chapels, ruins, coliseums, and artistic or dilettante shrines he zealously pilgrimed; and had much to say then and afterwards, and with real technical and historical knowledge I believe, about the objects of devotion there. But it often struck me as ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... 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, drastic, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... ask what you mix your colors with?" said a brisk dilettante student to the great painter. "With Brains, sir," was the gruff reply—and the right one. It did not give much of what we call information; it did not expound the principles and rules of the art; but, if the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... call fury, 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
... understand this contradiction, I discover a thousand ridiculous dirtinesses in my character (mille ridicole porcherie)." Another day he notes down, after describing the mean envy with which he has listened to the praises of another member of his little club of dilettante authors: "I do believe that as much praise as is being given and will ever be given to all mankind for every sort of praiseworthy thing, I should like to snap up for myself alone." Again, another day he writes: "More lazy than ever. Walking with a friend, and talking about our incomes, &c. I ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... things I 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
... — N. ignoramus, dunce; wooden spoon; no scholar. [insulting terms for ignorant person:] (imbecility) 499 (folly) 501 moron, imbecile, idiot; fool, jerk, nincompoop, asshole [Vulg.]. [person with superficial knowledge] dilettante, sciolist^, smatterer, dabbler, half scholar; charlatan; wiseacre. greenhorn, amateur &c (dupe) 547; novice, tyro &c (learner) 541; numskull. lubber &c (bungler) 701; fool &c 501; pedant &c 492. Adj. bookless^, shallow; ignorant &c 491. Phr. a wit with dunces ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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
... newspaper man, about to be held to account by one Chillingworth for this whole millenial occurrence, and sent off to a political convention to steady me, unless I'm fired. But St. George, he's a gay dilettante." ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... of the most interesting city there is apt to be a touch of the commonplace. It is in the slums and suburbs that the city dilettante finds his game. And there is nothing more characteristic and original than the outlying quarters of San Francisco. The Chinese district is the most famous; but it is far from the only truffle in the pie. There ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the downward slope of life. He would have loudly disclaimed such an opinion if it had been attributed to him; but nevertheless it was the key-note of his behavior towards them, his belief concerning them which was of a piece with his cheap cynicism and dilettante views of life. He now discovered that woman was made out of something more than ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... the appointed day one of his friends brought Christophe to the hall, where he sat at the back of a box. He was surprised to see that at this private rehearsal the hall—at least the ground floor seats—were almost all filled; a crowd of dilettante idlers and critics moved about and chattered to each other. The orchestra had to ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Mr. Kenyon's kindness," retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most splendid men living—a man so noble in his friendship, so ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... without sympathy nor scorn, for his mood led him to indulge in both, "you asked me why I remained out of the strife of the world, and looked on at the great labour of my neighbour without taking any part in the struggle? Why, what a mere dilettante you own yourself to be, in this confession of general scepticism, and what a listless spectator yourself! You are six-and-twenty years old; and as blase as a rake of sixty. You neither hope much nor ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a recognized dilettante, living only by and through music. Nicknamed "Il Fanatico." Known by the Duke and Duchess Cataneo ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... The whole duty of man in a quatrain! And remark, I do not set up to be a professional bard; these are the outpourings of a dilettante.' ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... today, and they are all painted by Blanche; the music is played by 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 in ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... he was much patronised by two of the great nobility, both members of the Dilettante Society, who did much to bring the young artist into notice—these were the great Lord Forestking and the well-remembered Sir Hyde Jungle. His Lordship's patronage had, in the first instance, been solicited for Mr. Porcupine by an eccentric individual, a Mr. Munkey, a hanger-on of the ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... evening he was doing nothing, which was very unusual for him. The necessity for society, or for activity, physical or mental, had long ago become as much a part of his nature as the desire for food. Dilettante musician as well as artist, when alone at this time of the evening he was generally at the upright piano in the corner. Even Alec noticed the unusual lack of occupation on this occasion, and exposed the key-board suggestively; ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... architect assured of his accuracy pushes on his builders without hesitancy or question, fear, or alarm; the engineer knowing his engine and his destination has no heart quiver as he handles the lever. It is the doubter, the unsure, the aimless, the dabbler, the frivolous, the dilettante, the uncertain that worry. How nobly Browning set this ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... thou not born, wilt thou not die? 'Explain' me all this, or do one of two things: Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done, and God's world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilettante and sand-blind Pedant." ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... artist, take so morbid and deeply ambiguous a work as Tristan and Isolde, 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 ... One constantly has the most peculiar experiences with regard to the origin, the co-phenomena, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... and mine and Mr. JOHN PALMER'S, who have exchanged their tools and toys, their pens, wigs, brushes, books, spats and dreams for stars (one, two or three) and scars; all drawn into the Great Adventure which began on that 4th of August so many long years ago. Dilettante Pelham, prig and pacificist not from passion but from detachment, always so unbeatable in argument and always so wrong; sportsman Rivers, seeing simply and straight; crank Smith; comfortable Baddeley in his snug Government berth; poser Ponsonby, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... the tips of his fingers. But far from being that he was in danger of remaining a sort of nondescript dilettante all his life. He had pushed the habit of universal raillery to a point where it blinded him to the genuine impulses of his own nature. To be suddenly selected for the executive member of the patriotic small-arms committee ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... 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 little, bitter-tongued man mobbed. But to his vast surprise not a word was said, and the dilettante hunters faded away one by one. The little man turned to Schoverling with a ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... as to either facts or problems, that give the seriousness, the earnestness to the literature of the Bible. Men who express great ideas in literary form are not dilettante about them. One of the English writers just now prominent as an essayist is often counted whimsical, trifling. One of his near friends keenly resents that opinion, insists instead that he is dead in earnest, serious to the last degree, purposeful in all his work. What makes that so difficult to ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... with the liveliest concern to his account of all his progress; she even made many admirable suggestions, for Lady Bertie and Bellair had been a frequent visitor at Cowes, and was quite initiated in the mysteries of the dilettante service of the Yacht Club. She was a capital sailor; at least she always told Tancred so. But this was not the chief source of sympathy, or the principal bond of union, between them. It was not the voyage, so much as the object of the voyage, that touched ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... little delay, and Peter had a chance to examine its motley members. The big landlord was a great swell, who had political ambitions, but was too exclusive, and too much of a dilettante to be a real force. Peter took a prejudice against him before meeting him, for he knew just how his election to the Assembly had been obtained—even the size of the check—and Peter thought buying an election was not a very creditable ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... dilettantism and dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for! Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven's-Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God's-Houses, the Golgotha ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... meant to be a lesson to you who write, everybody says, good sonnets. Sir E. Brydges would have been the same dilettante if he had written Epics—probably worse. I certainly don't like sonnets, as you know: we have been spoiled for them by Daddy Wordsworth, —-, and Co. Moxon must write them too forsooth. What do they seem fit ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Hamilton, who 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 ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... 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. I was grimly resolute. I had caught Aunt Elizabeth's eye as she passed ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... shrivelled the modern poet's ardent humour. Was this an example of the intellectual enlightenment awaiting him, he had so fondly hoped, in Athens? With apprehension he remembered what his father's friend, a rich dilettante, one of the best liked men in Rome, had written him when he sent him the letter ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... the Simiacine was eager, restless, full of suspicion. To the others the scheme obviously presented itself in a different light. Jack Meredith was dilettante, light-hearted, and unsatisfactory. It was impossible to arouse any enthusiasm in him—to make him take it seriously. Guy Oscard was gravely indifferent. He wanted to get rid of a certain space of time, ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... both grappled seriously with Greek philosophy and also endeavoured to carry it religiously into practice. Yet for the most part the Roman, even when he is a writer upon such subjects, carries with him the unmistakable air of the amateur or the dilettante. In reading Seneca, as in reading Cicero, we feel that we are dealing with an able man possessed of an excellent gift for popular exposition or essay-writing, but hardly with a man of original philosophic endeavour or of strong practical conviction. ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... suppose, that as yet, at least (i.e. in 1812), I am ignorant and unsuspicious of the avenging terrors which opium has in store for those who abuse its lenity. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that hitherto I have been only a dilettante eater of opium; eight years' practice even, with a single precaution of allowing sufficient intervals between every indulgence, has not been sufficient to make opium necessary to me as an article of daily ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... nature. Gavin Hamilton (1723-98) and Jacob More (1740?-93) two of its most 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
... the section of inner Jewish history most interesting to the Christian theologian? As yet we have only a most thankworthy preliminary study in Schuerer's great work, and beside it particular or dilettante attempts which hardly shew what the problem really is, far less solve it. What disclosures even the fourth book of the Maccabees alone yields for the connection of the Old Testament ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... 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 ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... important 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 ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... 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 ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... be offered, like a jewel, to the learned and illustrious lady, Isabella of Mantua. Marcantonio was no pedant, but these treasures simply had their place in the richly painted cabinet, beside many other bits of exquisite workmanship, because rare things in every art were beautiful to our dilettante, and possessions of all kinds came ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... unusually severe. For many days I saw him working on a Descent from the Cross by Tintoretto—a bold attempt, for Tintoretto's colors are as baffling as those of the great Venetian master himself. This copy had received very general praise, and one day I took a Lucca friend, a dilettante, to see it. Mr. G—— brought the canvas out in the hall, that we might see it outside of the ocean of color which surrounded it in the gallery. When we reached the hall, Mr. G—— turned the picture full to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • 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; ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... apprentices were meant the advanced students, or learners of the law, who, as pupils or assistants to the Serjeants of the Coif, had obtained an insight into practice, and perhaps also there were included the more irregular followers of the law—the dilettante practitioners and Cleri Causidici, who continued to follow the law in the secular courts in spite ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... specially written and prepared to assist people out of the very difficulty into which we had fallen—a book carefully compiled with the express object of enabling English travellers who, like ourselves, only spoke German in a dilettante fashion, to make their modest requirements known throughout the Fatherland, and to get out of the ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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
... real intellectual charm of Oxford, which has been ever the centre of strenuous life, rather than of dilettante dreamings. From the very beginning, she has been a city of "Movements." Some visitors, then, will come to Oxford as the home and the burial-place of Roger Bacon, representing as he does the Franciscan Order, with its Christ-like sympathy for the poor ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... for its heat, Its hate—its absence of the Light and Sweet, So jays might flout the vulture. Partisan bitterness and purblind haste? Come, view the haunts of dilettante ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... lingering in the air, even at the dead of winter, in the latitude of London, and when the enjoying section of the day is barely commencing, everything is left which a man would care to retain. A mere dilettante or amateur student, having no mercenary interest concerned, would, upon a refinement of luxury—would, upon choice, give up so much time to study, were it only to sharpen the value of what remained for pleasure. And thus ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... comes this? How has this moderately-good organ been brought to such perfection? By a process not very prevalent amongst English singers—practice the most constant, study the most unwearied. Punch will bet a wager with any sporting dilettante that Miss Kemble has sung more while learning her art, than many old stagers while professing and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... were readily voted by the Chambers. The people of Paris were kept 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. Further ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Labour Party, although he could be Prime Minister to-morrow if he cared about it; he is one of the most retiring men whom I ever knew. At the present moment I believe that he would have preferred to have remained living his hermit's life, a writer and a dilettante, if circumstances had not dragged him into politics. He lives in the simplest way and hates all society save the company of ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... 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 ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... humour (indicating some yet unconquered province of the soul) that guards and embalms the purer strength of feeling, keeps it airy and spiritual, and frees it from moan and heaviness. Here we have no insistance on suffering, no literary heart-breaks, no dilettante pessimism; but those indefinable harmonies of freedom and law, of the ascendency of the soul and the sovereignty of fate, of Nature and the spaces of the mind, that in the works of the great masters represent, if they do not explain, the mystery ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... and may be considered a good writer, for, however careless and disorderly, he is often vivid and usually amusing. He was of course something of a dilettante and antiquarian. He had a sound sense for natural beauty. He was an enthusiastic friend as well as a venomous enemy. He was infinitely tender to animals. His insolence could be unmeasured, and as he had no defect of courage it was just as likely to be bestowed on his superiors ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... notebook to sell, I should not have come to Egypt for my sick-leave; and none of us would have met. I had visited the artist's studio to please a friend, and bought a picture to please him (not myself); therefore he regarded me as a charitable dilettante, likely to buy anything if properly approached. Bad luck had come to him; he wanted to try pastures new, and needed money at short notice: therefore he wished to dispose of a secret which might be the key to fortune. Why didn't ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... a dilettante like you to sit in judgment?" he demanded, the other's barb rankling none the less that he had invited it. "You have no notion of just political expediency; no notion even of politics with which you meddle. Politics isn't book knowledge; it's flesh and blood fact. Party ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an object to him as a searcher of knowledge — neither would have vogue in America — neither would help him to a career. Both of them led him away from his objects, into an English dilettante museum of scraps, with nothing but a wall-paper to unite them in any relation of sequence. Possibly English taste was one degree more fatal than English scholarship, but even this question was open to argument. Adams went to the sales and bought what he was told to buy; now ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... while shunning the appearance of inquisitiveness, he was far too eager to get hold of his new acquaintance to think of volunteering much himself. Here to him was this citizen of the new country who all his life had lived in the palace of art, and that in no dilettante fashion, but with set aim and serious purpose. And Falbe abounded in such topics; he knew the singers and the musicians of the world, and, which was much more than that, he was himself of them; humble, no doubt, in circumstances and achievement as yet, but clearly to ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... experiment has been made in many forms, but no one has yet been nourished by the fruit of the tree of knowledge who has eaten of that fruit alone. In the art of living, as in all the arts which illustrate and enrich living, the amateur and the dilettante have no real position; they never attain to that mastery of knowledge or of execution which alone give reality to a man's life or work. Mastery in any art comes to those only who give themselves without reservation ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... records which some of our own young officers 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 in the months which preceded ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... will live by their weight, their quality, their beauty of form. Nor are these earlier writers of "Pensees" likely to have a more permanent place among the seed-sowers of thought. Amiel himself declared that "the pensee-writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist. He plays with thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things of detail; but he is more anxious about truths than truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity, escapes him.... In a word, the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 never previously have used a desk ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... truth blame herself for having given him no profession, and having acquiesced in the indolent dilettante habits which made all harder to him now; and she was not certain how far it was only his fancy that his health and nerves were perilously affected, though Dr. Medlicott, whom she secretly consulted, assured her that the only remedies ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... company of robins and bluebirds, which he enjoyed excessively. One day, in the midst of a most successful concert, an envious gust swept down the cage, up went the door, and out flew the frightened bird. I could have borne to lose him, but I was sure he would lose himself,—a tender little dilettante, served a prince all the days of his life, never having to lift a finger to help himself, or knowing a want unsatisfied. Now, thrown suddenly upon his own resources, homeless, friendless, forlorn, how could ever make his fortune in this bleak ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... much of Fielding in the last and most interesting third of his life. Another witness, Horace Walpole, to less knowledge and equally dubious accuracy, added decided ill-will, which may have been due partly to the shrinking of a dilettante and a fop from a burly Bohemian; but I fear is also consequent upon the fact that Horace could not afford to despise Fielding's birth, and knew him to be vastly his own superior in genius. We hear something of him again from Richardson; and Richardson hated him with the hatred of dissimilar ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... 1649. The most famous incidents of his life are the visit that Ben Jonson paid to him, and the much discussed notes of that visit which Drummond left in manuscript. It would appear, on the whole, that Drummond was an example of a well-known type of cultivated dilettante, rather effeminate, equally unable to appreciate Jonson's boisterous ways and to show open offence at them, and in the same way equally disinclined to take the popular side and to endure risk and loss in defending his principles. He shows better in his verse. His sonnets are of the true ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... world than literary reputation, and that one of the best of those good things is the regard and friendship of those deservedly and generally esteemed for their worth or their talents. I believe many dilettante authors do cocker themselves up into a great jealousy of anything that interferes with what they are pleased to call their fame: but I should as soon think of nursing one of my own fingers into a whitlow for my private amusement as encouraging ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... when exalting the loved one 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
... only continue to shine upon and 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 veil, and to whom the things of this world ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... "hear with our ears" this interesting work; for as a rule great musical compositions are peculiarly unfortunate among works of art, in being known at first hand by comparatively few persons. In this way is rendered possible that pretentious kind of dilettante criticism which is so common in musical matters, and which is often positively injurious, as substituting a factitious public opinion for one that is genuine. We hope that the favour with which the new oratorio has already been received will encourage the author to pursue the enviable career upon ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske |
