"Dilettante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... firmness. Nor were they well-digested reports alone that were transmitted to the sovereign: they came accompanied with many rare and curious articles, grateful to the taste of one who was not only a religious reformer but a dilettante; golden candlesticks and costly chalices; sometimes a jewelled pix; fantastic spoons and patens, rings for the fingers and the ear; occasionally a fair-written and blazoned manuscript—suitable offering to the royal scholar. Greymount was noticed; sent for; promoted in the household; knighted; ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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; ...
— Faust • Goethe
... 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 a beautiful ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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, there's no harm ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... it. Seeking to 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 ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... they outstripped the nobles who dwelt outside the gates and spent all their time in fighting. The guilds of Florence united men of the same trade and also encouraged perfection in the various branches. Goldsmiths offered marvellous wares for the purchase of the affluent dilettante. Silk was a natural manufacture, and paper had to be produced in a place where the School of ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... 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 ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... sound and steadfast policy in 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 ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... really remarkable work 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, a ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... 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 posted, is really aimed at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... 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 who has grown strong amidst its healthful influences, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... conclusion that this was but another instance of an "Intellectual" studying the social and economic side of Industry from first-hand observation. It was a common enough thing in the Old Land. He was conscious of a little contempt for this dilettante sort of Labour Unionism, and he was further conscious of a feeling of impatience and embarrassment at Captain Jack's presence. He belonged to the enemy camp, and what right had he there? From looks cast in their direction it was plain that others were asking the same question. His thought received ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... in 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 as every public and official, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... old 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 he use the key himself? was the obvious question; which he answered ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited young man 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 ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was an 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, in the usefulness of which he did not believe. The Secretary said that of course there was a good deal ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 of pretension which tries to make a knowledge ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... 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 Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... had over against it the great foil and counterpoise of the pietist movement. Rationalism ran a much soberer course than in France. It was never a revolutionary and destructive movement as in France. It was not a dilettante and aristocratic movement as deism had been in England. It was far more creative and constructive than elsewhere. Here also before the end of the century it had run its course. Yet here the men who transcended the rationalist movement and shaped the spiritual revival in the beginning ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... somebody to look at, it did not suit Miss Hazel's ideas to be looking. She could not tease Mr. Falkirk, who had gone to sleep; Mr. Kingsland was absolutely beyond reach, except of rather thorny wishes; and when at length the dilettante cigar perfumes began to assert themselves, Wych Hazel flung the rest of her patience straight out of the window, and looked after it. The coach was stopping just then by another wayside inn, to exchange mail-bags and water the horses, ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... great strikes, and its 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 between ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... 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 hiring a taxi on another. I am mistaken ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 attention of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... great gallery of the Prado, was long since dead. He consented, basing his picture upon a likeness of much earlier date, to paint Isabella d'Este Gonzaga as a young woman when she was already an old one, thereby flattering an amiable and natural weakness in this great princess and unrivalled dilettante, but impairing his own position as an artist of supreme rank.[7] It is not necessary to include in this category the popular Caterina Cornaro of the Uffizi, since it is confessedly nothing but a fancy portrait, making no reference to the true ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... 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 ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... match me that? 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
... he repeated, contemptuously. "Is it worth while, then, to play golf, to linger in your flower gardens, to become a dilettante student, to dream away your days in the idleness of a purely enervating culture? What is it that I heard you yourself say once—that life apart from one's fellows must always lack robustness. You have the instincts of the creator, Mannering. You cannot stifle ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... the Fourth Party, apparently content to fetch and carry for his colleagues, and was believed to have no definite ambitions of his own. His reputation in the parliament of 1880-1886 was that of a dilettante, who allied himself with the three politicians already named from a feeling of irresponsibility rather than of earnest purpose; he was regarded as one who, on the rare occasions when he spoke, was more desirous to impart an academic quality ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... other men Love Elia for his antic pen, And watch with dilettante eyes His page for every quaint surprise, Curious of caviare phrase. Yea; these who will not also praise? We surely must, but which is more The motley that his sorrow wore, Or the great heart whose valorous beat Upheld his brave unfaltering feet Along the narrow ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... his one little branch—in the classification of toadstools, or Carthaginian history—he waxes great in 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... correlates, patient thought and study, as opposed to the arrogant amateurism which, without rudimentary qualifications, claims to have a voice in the solution of every problem under the sun. It is largely to this dilettante temperament of the nation and its rulers that we owe the disasters we have sustained and the dangers with ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... I thought he was lovely, and he smiled rather sadly; and although he seems to have not much knowledge of literature in a dilettante sense, he has a great splendid mind; and if there are many more senators like him at Washington this country ought to be the best governed in the world. He makes you feel you are on a mountain top or in pine forests, ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... 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 ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... his reply in the affirmative, he cut off his head, so that Vassili-Blagennoi might remain unrivalled forever. A more flattering exhibition of jealous cruelty cannot be imagined, but this Ivan the Terrible was at bottom a true artist and a passionate dilettante. Such ferocity in matters of art is more pleasing to ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... conquerors to preserve its ancient glories. But in the first century Athens was neither the fascinating capital of the time of Cicero, nor of the age of Chrysostom. Its temples and statues remained intact, but its schools could not then boast of a single man of genius. There remained only dilettante philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, pedagogues, and pedants, puffed up with conceit and arrogance, with very few real inquirers after truth, such as marked the times of Socrates and Plato. Paul, like Luther, cared nothing for art; and the thousands of statues which ornamented ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... vices and artificialities of that country, 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 ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... shrines of all she worshipped safe within Our tall barbarian temples, and the thrones That crowned Olympus mighty as of old. The god of music rules the Sabbath choir; The lyric muse must leave the sacred nine To help us please the dilettante's ear; Plutus limps homeward with us, as we leave The portals of the temple where we knelt And listened while the god of eloquence (Hermes of ancient days, but now disguised In sable vestments) with that other god Somnus, the son of Erebus ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... discussions they might be called, were not of a very serious kind. In true dilettante style the fashionable young philosophers culled from the newest books the newest thoughts and theories, and retailed them in the salon or the ballroom. And they were always sure to find attentive listeners. The more ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... scrap, With a sort of Blackheath, and Black Forest, mayhap, Is consider'd as rather Rembrandty; And that very black cattle and very black sheep, A black dog, and a shepherd as black as a sweep, Are the pets of some great Dilettante. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... from their midst the Dilettante stalks abroad. The Amateur is loosed. The voice of the Aesthete is heard in the land, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge and long-continued loving industry that make the true dilettante. A man must have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is no youngling enthusiasm on hilltops that can possess itself of the last essence of beauty. Probably most people's heads are growing bare before they can see all in ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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, drastic, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... (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 diet. But now comes a different ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... is specially trained for a race of troops may go along into the field. Only the man versed in statecraft should be allowed to participate in the talk about the results of war. Not he who has out yonder proved an unworthy diplomat, nor the dilettante loafer sprayed with the perfume of volatile emotions. Manhood liability to military service requires manhood suffrage? That question may rest for the time being; likewise the desire for equality of that right shall not be argued today. But common sense should warn against ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 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 is ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... 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 ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... Parisian to 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 of Sulaco seemed ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... was there to help, she was bent on bringing everything to a pitch of cleanliness and order that would have satisfied her Aunt Poyser. The cottage was far from that standard at present, for Lisbeth's rheumatism had forced her to give up her old habits of dilettante scouring and polishing. When the kitchen was to her mind, Dinah went into the new room, where Adam had been writing the night before, to see what sweeping and dusting were needed there. She opened the window and let in the fresh ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... 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
... Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest pictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of the smaller theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments and their standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece to some dilettante work on classical antiquities. For the rest, perhaps the Aliscamps, or ancient Roman burial-ground, is the most interesting thing at Arles, not only because of Dante's celebrated lines in the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... one mass of misery and evil! Not a paper do I take up but I see something about wretchedness and crime, and here I sit with health, strength, and knowledge, and able to do nothing, nothing—at the risk of breaking my mother's heart! I have pottered about cottages and taught at schools in the dilettante way of the young lady who thinks it her duty to be charitable; and I am told that it is my duty, and that I may be satisfied. Satisfied, when I see children cramped in soul, destroyed in body, that ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... noble Venetian, a recognized dilettante, living only by and through music. Nicknamed "Il Fanatico." Known by the Duke and Duchess Cataneo and their friends. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... 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 meanwhile, but not in any spirit of resentment. In fact, he had nothing ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... 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
... communicative. And, indeed, 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 of the blood royal ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... 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
... 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 ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... well-known Harlem dry-goods merchant and violin dilettante, entered Potash & Perlmutter's showroom the next morning Morris greeted him with ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... dilettante spirit which refuses to see the connection between art and money has also a tendency to repudiate the world of men at large, as being unfit for the habitation of artists. This is a still more serious error of attitude—especially in a storyteller. No artist is ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... clamored for glory, the second Louis revelled in gayety, frivolity, and sensuality. This was the difference between both monarchs and both arts. The gay and the coquettish in painting had already been introduced by the Regent, himself a dilettante in art, and when Louis XV. came to the throne it passed from the gay to the insipid, the flippant, even the erotic. Shepherds and shepherdesses dressed in court silks and satins with cottony sheep beside them posed in stage-set Arcadias, pretty gods and ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... the ice wagon; you had to do lots of backing, with much stern calling to the big horses, and often it took a long time to ease the big boxes to the sidewalk—time and grunting exclamations. Still it was not unattractive to the dilettante, and he rode beside Trimble with profit to his knowledge of ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... contrasts and the like; and it is not quite certain that she saw very 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 ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... with which our opponents charge us. It was too deliberate, 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 our souls and made ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... contained in his person, or in his 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
... you or your father said you had been his pupil. H'm. Praed. Yes, I visualize him. Rather a dilettante—whimsical—I didn't like what I heard of him at one time. However it's no affair of mine. And Honoria Fraser! She's simply one of the best women I know. It's curious she wasn't here—At least I didn't see her—this afternoon. She's a friend of my wife's. I knew ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... graphically of what one dollar will buy in different kinds of light; "table, weight of copper required different distance, 100-ohm lamp, 16 candles"; table with curves showing increased economy by larger engine, higher power, etc. There is not much that is dilettante about all this. Note is made of an article in April, 1879, putting the total amount of gas investment in the whole world at that time at $1,500,000,000; which is now (1910) about the amount of the electric-lighting investment in the United States. Incidentally a note remarks: ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... eventually finding it. The heroism of the poet consists in working on in loneliness; but his crown of glory is won only when all men are singing his songs. And every genuine artist, as opposed to the mere improviser or dilettante, wishes his work to endure.[Footnote: See Anatole France: Le Lys Rouge. "Moi, dit Choulette, je pense si peu a l'avenir terrestre que j'ai ecrit mes plus beaux poemes sur les feuilles de papier a cigarettes. Elles se sont facilement evanuies, ne laissant a mes vers qu'une espece ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... CRABB, literary dilettante, born at Bury St. Edmunds; lived some years at Weimar, and got acquainted with Goethe and his circle; called to the English bar, and on quitting practice at it with a pension, became acquainted with the literary notabilities in London, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... humility and the renunciation of all greeds. And that candid, reverent gaze which he turned upon her to-day had been so well calculated to speak of purity to one who had shivered under sidelong leers. He had indeed that supreme mastery over vice which comes of a complete understanding and dilettante love of virtues. He knew how the innocent hunger for love and pity, and, knowing well what these things were, he could speak as one who came as their messenger. Loathingly and yet giving homage to his workmanship, she recalled that later scence by which he had added a grace ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the old school, who, from prejudice or custom, adhered to Hasse and Metastasio, predicted failure. This party was composed of Italians, and of all those who had "gone out" with old Austria. New Austria, on the other hand, with all the young dilettante of Vienna, were resolved to sustain Gluck, and, if possible, secure to his new opera an unprecedented triumph. The excitement reached even those boxes where sat the elite of the Viennese nobility. Even THEIR voices were to be heard discussing the merits or demerits of the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Carlyle. They hold that the only happiness for a dog in this life is to find his work and to do it. The idle, 'dilettante', non-working, aristocratic dog they ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... 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 ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... 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 is many another dingy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... reminded of it each time I wrote to Tanno or Vedia, I did not forget that I was a proscribed fugitive, my life forfeit if I were detected. I conceived that my best disguise was to dress, act and talk as much as possible in the character of dilettante art expert and music-lover, which I had assumed. Falco treated me, as he had prophesied, almost as a brother. I had a luxurious apartment in each of his town residences and country villas, and a retinue of servants: valet, bath- ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... scorned O-liver's point of view and told him so. They were a rather prosperous bunch, all except Tommy Drew, who dealt in a dilettante fashion in insurance, and who sat at O-liver's feet and ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... changing suddenly his jesting tone for one of grave earnestness. "No, I will learn of you. I am not satisfied to be a poor-souled dilettante in poetry, though assured I can. never be a Virgil or a Voltaire. I know that the study of poetry demands the life, the undivided heart and mind. I am but a poor galley-slave, chained to the ship of state; or, if you will, a pilot, who does ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... was a painful parturition, not the pain of a stylist like Flaubert, but the Sisyphus-like labor of getting his notes, his facts, his characters marshalled and moving to a conclusion. Like Anthony Trollope, when the last page of a book was finished he began another. He was a workman, not a dilettante of letters. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... hierarchically graded, with French as the universal language. According to the demands of the passion papillonne, each one should carry on the most different kinds of business side by side, and each one of them at most two hours per day; i.e., every one should be a dilettante, no one a master, and everything should be done as badly as possible. Proudhon, Contradictions economiques, ch. 3, objects to this, that a workman must, in some way, be held responsible for his work. Fourier ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... 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 ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Whether his fastidiousness could have stood the conditions of literary existence without private means was now and then debated by his friends; it could probably have done so better than was supposed, for he sometimes startled those who set him down as a dilettante by a horny way of retiring into his shell for the finish of a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Latomia, than some States in America, where convicts are leased to mining companies, and kept quarrying coal, without even the sweet consolation of staring up at this magical blue sky. We leave hideous moral and physical leprosy at home, and come here to shed dilettante tears over classic tatters twenty-five centuries old! O immortal ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the heroic and disinterested woman. The very glow of her poetic enthusiasm was but an outflush of trustful affection; the very restlessness of her intellect was the confession that her heart had found no home. A "book-worm," "a dilettante," "a pedant," I had heard her sneeringly called; but now it was evident that her seeming insensibility was virgin pride, and her absorption in study the natural vent of emotions, which had met no object worthy of ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Butt in the dining-room of the Colley Cibber Club Hennessey had been but a dilettante fellow. He had written a play, but airily, and without the twenty years of arduous and persistent study declared by the dramatic critics to be absolutely necessary before any intelligent man can learn how to get a bishop on, or a chambermaid off, the stage. He had nearly proposed to a clergyman's ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the anthologist's is not quite the dilettante business for which it is too often and ignorantly derided. I say this, and immediately repent; since my wish is that the reader should in his own pleasure quite forget the editor's labour, which too has been pleasant: that, standing aside, I may believe this book has made the Muses' access easier ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... he must face as premier? Most unlikely, it was 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 ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... 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
... 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 ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... was—never seemed, in fact, to think twice about it. And if he, the husband, did not, how much less did Aimee, the trustful wife? Yet who could tell how much misery any shadows of illegality might cast into the future? One evening Roger, sitting by the languid, careless, dilettante Osborne, began to question him as to the details of the marriage. Osborne knew instinctively at what Roger was aiming. It was not that he did not desire perfect legality in justice to his wife; it was that he was so indisposed ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... affair of politics, respecting which, when the need existed, he could, for parties' sake or on behalf of principle, maintain a certain amount of necessary zeal; it was not with him a subject for dilettante warfare, and courteous common-place opposition. To him it was life and death. He would willingly have been a martyr in the cause, had the cause ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of power, his delight in cruelty, in beauty, in the erotic, the violent, the strange, had vanished! Pierre Pilleux was a humanitarian. Cecil Grimshaw never had been. Grimshaw had revolted against ugliness as a dilettante objects to the mediocre in art. Pierre Pilleux was conscious of social ugliness. Having become aware of it, he was a potent rebel. He began to write in French, spreading his revolutionary doctrine of facile spiritual reward. He splintered purgatory into fragments; what he ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... that 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 ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... no ordinary idler, for he haunted the Harvard Library, and we know that all his life he was a lover of books. In 1841 he was graduated from Harvard, and went home to Lowell to read law in his father's office, where Benjamin F. Butler was at that time a partner. The dilettante attitude which characterized his college years is now no longer in evidence. He writes to a friend, "I shall study law for the present to oblige father; he is in some trouble, and I wish to make him as happy as possible. The future course of my life is undetermined, except ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... 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, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... ironical 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 ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... 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
... actual into a position wherein it catches glints of the imagination. The imagination is a universal touchstone. The sense of reality is a special, an individual faculty. When one is poetizing in an amateur, a dilettante way, as most of us poetize, a picture of Courbet, which seems to flaunt and challenge the imagination in virtue of its defiant reality, its insistence on the value and significance of the prosaic and the actual, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... who 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 ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... 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
... will be the leader of the whole 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
... and displayed the humorous side of Arsene Lupin, burglar though he was, but dilettante as well. He combined business with pleasure. He reminded us of the author who almost died in a fit of laughter provoked by his own play. Certainly, he was an artist in his particular line of work, and whenever I saw Rozaine, gloomy and ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... I was not a thinker, not a philosopher, but simply a dilettante. God had given me a strong healthy Russian brain with promise of talent. And, only fancy, here was that brain at twenty-six, undisciplined, completely free from principles, not weighed down by any stores of knowledge, but only lightly sprinkled with information of a sort in the engineering ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the sequel to a similar "revival" in the study of Greek and Roman literature, then occupying the interests of cultivated scholars. It was but a step further to desire also the realization of those architectural splendors which were associated with these studies. Such dilettante dreams can not be supposed to have deeply interested the general public, with whose concerns they had but a remote connection; so under these circumstances, probably the classical style was as suitable as any other, chosen on such ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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 ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... 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
... bearing borders of hieroglyphics of Amasis, Nectanebos or even Rameses II. On other obelisks that were erected in the propyleums even the inscriptions of the emperors were written in hieroglyphics.[35] Half a century later that true dilettante, Hadrian, caused the luxuries of Canopus to be reproduced, along with the vale of Tempe, in his immense villa at Tibur, to enable him to celebrate his voluptuous feasts under the friendly eyes of Serapis. He extolled ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... 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 to me. He had, however, been ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... 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 all the passion of Lady ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... not know what it loses in allowing its judgment to be stampeded by unconscionable journalism. Lord Haldane is no political dilettante. Few men in modern times have brought to politics a mind so trained in right thinking, or a spirit so full of that impressive quality, as Morley calls it, the presentiment of the eve: "a feeling of the difficulties ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... to this day one of the finest and noblest heads. Artists 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. ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... undecided as to his future career. A life of leisure and belles-lettres looked the most tempting to him. He had read up a little in medicine, but the practice would not please his fastidious inclinations. Law had its objections. In fact, Mr. Lawrence had dropped into that dilettante state into which extreme cultivation, without genius or ambition, is apt to drift its possessor. He was nearing twenty-four now,—handsome, aristocratic, the pride of his family, and the distraction of young women in general. Invitations were showered ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... 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. I was grimly resolute. I had caught Aunt Elizabeth's ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... to the next generation almost as signally as old Sir Philip, although in a totally different manner. Archibald Lovell had indeed been curiously devoid of any sense of paternal responsibility. Connoisseur and collector of old porcelain, he had lived a dreamy, dilettante existence, absorbed in his collection and paying little or no heed to the comings and goings of his two children, Ann and her brother Robin. And less heed still to their ultimate welfare. He neglected his estate from every point of view, except the one of raising mortgages upon it so that ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... 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 enemy, against strict orders, showed, with all his eccentricities, remarkable musical gifts, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... 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
... any one volunteering for such a purpose 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
... on, with considerable loss of ease: "I suppose the accursed dilettante habit has got into my blood. I needed these unhappy days and nights, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... with her to share in her silent irony. At that moment she felt some of the very common conceit of the rich dilettante, who tastes but who never creates, for whom indeed most of the creation is ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... 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 ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... his nature had been spoiled by the 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 things, ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... some incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold's French estimates, of some inability to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a pensee-writer. He is rococo beside La Bruyere, dilettante beside La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even if you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and amateurish and conventional about him. But this is by no means always or very often the case; ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... directly to the animal rather than vegetable life, and when he left medicine it was to turn explicitly to zoology as a life study. Here he believed he should find a wider field than in art, which he loved almost as well, and which, it may be added, he has followed all his life as a dilettante of much more than amateurish skill. Had he so elected, Haeckel might have made his mark in art quite as definitely as he has made it in science. Indeed, even as the case stands, his draughtsman's skill has been more than a mere recreation to him, for without his ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold;—a stalwart laboring force, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... handicraftsman, journeyman, mechanic, workman, laborer, operative, industrial. Antonyms: idler, drone, dabbler, sluggard, truant, dilettante, loafer, shirker. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 to him. He then moved on, carefully scraped his shoes, clean ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... drifted away; he, frivolous and dilettante, she with her face as set as Fate, leaving the ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... red, sensuous mouth, the lips of which were rapaciously drooping at the corners; the baroness Tefting, little, exquisite, pale—she was everywhere seen with the artiste; the famous lawyer Ryazanov; and Volodya Chaplinsky, a rich young man of the world, a composer-dilettante, the author of several darling little ballads and many witticisms upon the topics of the day, which ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... been 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 ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... (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 to Raeburn was chiefly that of a cicerone. There was ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... women? We can easily discover. It saps their noble ambition, assails their health, lowers their estimate of men, and their reverence for women, cherishes an eager and aimless rivalry, weakens true feeling, wipes away the bloom of true modesty, and induces an ennui, a satiety, and a kind of dilettante misanthropy, which is only the more monstrous because it is undoubtedly real. You shall hear young men of intelligence and cultivation, to whom the unprecedented circumstances of this country offer opportunities of a great and beneficent career, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... 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 used to James T. Fields in speaking ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... would answer well on the stage; most of the scenes seem to demand dramatic accessories to give them their full effect. But I think one cannot with justice bestow higher praise than this. To speak candidly, I felt, in reading the tale, a wondrous hollowness in the moral and sentiment; a strange dilettante shallowness in the purpose and feeling. After all, 'Jack' is not much better than a 'Tony Lumpkin,' and there is no very great breadth of choice between the clown he IS and the fop his father would have made him. The grossly material life of the old English fox-hunter, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... content that whatever change had passed over the spirits of my companions, they had at least lost no fibre of their individuality. The change that had passed over them was like the change that passes over a young man, who has lived at the University among dilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when he finds himself plunged into the urgent practical activities of the world. Our happiness was the happiness which comes of intense toil, with no fatigue to dog it, and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... little. The population, 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... 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 ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... in fact, without exception, his greatest pleasure, and interest—even passion. The temperament that gave to beauty and charm a rather inordinate value had, no doubt, descended to his nephew. But Cecil was, in that as in everything else, much less of a dilettante. ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson |
