"Amateurish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "You are always doing for others. It is hardly kind to ask you; but we have some months to spare; there need be no haste." Charley hastened to relieve the Cure's anxiety. "Do not apologise," he said. "I will do what I can when I can. But as for drawing, Monsieur, it will be but amateurish." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as to God's sensations at having such amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist "experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... and which has a certain number of the tool marks showing, as though the worker were not ashamed to let his craftsmanship be seen. Work which has been touch and retouched, and rubbed down and smoothed until all life, vigour, and crispness have departed from it, looks what it is, amateurish (in ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily, the manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and meet with a certain external acceptation throughout all the others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments of a clique. But manners, like art, should be human ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of games and outdoor sports, the records of such pastimes as horse-racing, boxing, rowing, billiards, tennis and golf prove that here also the same contrast is generally to be found. Hence it has come about that the term "amateur,'' and more especially the adjectival derivative "amateurish,'' has acquired a secondary meaning, usually employed somewhat contemptuously, signifying inefficiency, unskilfulness, superficial knowledge ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... morning's reading as Magsie did. The three most influential papers did not comment upon Miss Clay's acting at all. In two more, little Miss Elsie Eaton and Bryan Masters shared the honors. The Sun remarked frankly that Miss Clay's amateurish acting, her baby lisp, her utter unacquaintance with whatever made for dramatic art, would undoubtedly insure the play a long run. Rachael knew that Warren would see all these papers, but she cut out all the pleasanter reviews and put ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... in capitals, as in head-lines and running-heads, should be avoided by the young compositor; there are places where it may be unobjectionable but it will require good judgment and some experience to prevent such lines making the page look freakish or amateurish. ...
— Capitals - A Primer of Information about Capitalization with some - Practical Typographic Hints as to the Use of Capitals • Frederick W. Hamilton
... stick with a gold handle, Louis Quatorze fashion. From her huge civet muff a gold purse dangled. She looked at once more conventional and more dynamic than Mary had seen her, and her rich dress made the simple effects of the tent seem amateurish. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... Clubs," whose members were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard, and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... cannot achieve certain and definite results in this or any other field so long as we continue to deal with materials we do not understand. Yet that is what all men are doing today. The elements of truth are befogged in vague and amateurish mysticism, and the subject of individual efficiency when we get beyond mere preaching and moralizing is a chaos ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... He Is Hidden Near The Oakwood Club." For a moment the blood left her face, and her nerves tightened, but when the trap was pulled up she was herself, and the smile she gave the soldier in charge brought forth an earnest but amateurish salute. ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... reach only a very small fraction of the population. Moreover, the expense of trade schools is enormous, and those who are best able to judge assure me that, inasmuch as the work which they do is not done under conditions of pecuniary success or failure, it is apt to be too amateurish and speculative, and that it does not prepare the worker for the real conditions under which he will have to carry out his work. In any case, the fact that the schools are very expensive, and the fact that they are accessible only to a ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... was at an age when he was beginning to talk a little and walk a little and take a great interest in things. His walking was a bit amateurish, and his speech rather hard to follow unless you had the key to it. But nobody could have denied that his walk, though staggery, was a genuine walk, and his speech, though limited, genuine speech, within the meaning ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... and each one of them, without disclosing his identity to any one but the central bureau, sends to it a statement of personal impressions, a composite picture of the mental physiognomy can be worked out. Of course all this has been often done in the terms of popular psychology and in a haphazard, amateurish way. The new plan is to arrange the questions systematically under the point of view of scientific descriptive psychology. Regular psychograms, in which the probability of a particular kind of behavior is to be determined in an exact percentage calculation, are to replace ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... announcements were nauseating. But they answered their purpose only too well. The great and still religious bourgeois class was securely hooked; and then the name of "Middle Class Halls" was dropped, and the programme provided in these garish palaces became simply an inexpensive and rather amateurish imitation of those of the older halls, plus a kind of prudish, sentimental, and even quasi-religious lubricity, which made them altogether revolting, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... was delightful, for I need hardly say that I sing as I do everything else—remarkably well. Another sympathized with my sketching propensities. We rambled in the woods together with boxes and colors. I found it charming. "Nothing amateurish" about my style, Miss Pinklake said. A third sympathized with my taste for horses: my restive Nero was the "sweetest pet" she ever saw. (My groom says, "He's the divvil hisself, Muster Charley.") With her I rode in the afternoon. She told me—Miss ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... her it was a perfectly natural mistake, the placard being but an amateurish affair; but he ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... obvious and even trite; his letters may lack any flavour of personality; but these dispatches are literature. Like his hero Napoleon, like Caesar and Wellington, Sir John French has forged a literary style for himself. There is nothing amateurish or journalistic about his communications from the front. The dispatch from Mons, for instance, is a masterpiece of lucid and incisive English. It might well be printed in our school-histories, not ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... done by enlisting a development of recent days,—the Social Service agencies. Out of the old-time charity has come a fine successor, social service; out of the amateurish, self-consciously gracious and sweet Lady Bountiful has come the social worker. Unfortunately social service has not yet dropped the name "Charity", perhaps has not been able to do so, largely because the well-to-do from whom the money must come like to think of themselves as charitable, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... inspired this exhibition of feeling would probably not have affected the casual spectator to quite the same degree. He would have seen merely a very faulty and amateurish portrait of a singularly repellent little boy of about eleven, who stared out from the canvas with an expression half stolid, half querulous; a bulgy, overfed little boy; a little boy who looked exactly what he was, the spoiled ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... economist, using great caution, might possibly have drawn the whole bulk of his data from travelers' accounts, as Cairnes did, and still have reached fairly sound conclusions; but Cairnes gave preference not to the concrete observations of the travelers but to their generalizations, often biased or amateurish, and on them erected his own. Furthermore, he ignored such material as would conflict with his preconceptions. His conclusions, accordingly, are now true, now false, and while always vivid are seldom substantially illuminating. His picture of ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... later still, he once more returns to the attack, and declares that Wagner's music, "apart from the performance, is simply amateurish, void of contents, and disagreeable; and it is a sad proof of corrupt taste that, in the face of the many dramatic master-works which Germany has produced, some persons have the presumption to belittle ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... her in the main salon. Cleigh, senior, stood before the phonograph listening to Caruso. The roll of the yacht in nowise disturbed the mechanism of the instrument. There was no sudden sluing of the needle, due to an amateurish device which Cleigh himself had constructed. The son, stooping, was searching the titles of a row of new novels. The width of the salon stretched between ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... there were quite admirable tableaux and some very intelligent individual playing—in contrast with the team-work of (particularly) the First Act, which was ragged and amateurish. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... He was colouring like a boy. Lady Carey's thin lips curled. She had no sympathy with such amateurish love-making. Nevertheless, his embarrassment was ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... interest in 'this wonderful country.' I confess, to some of us, India and its people are holy terrors. As for art and music and theatres—where are they, except what we make for ourselves, in our indefatigable, amateurish way. Can't you see—you, with your imaginative insight—that we have virtually nothing but each other? If we spent our days bowing and scraping and dining and dancing with due decorum, there'd be a boom in suicides and the people ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... was intellectually large in academic and literary qualities, and comprehensive. It appears to me that the telling of the story was, in his estimation, the highest office of art, so that, while his drawing was bad in style, his execution scrappy and amateurish and deficient in breadth and subordination, his compositions were often masterly, fine in conception, and harmonious in line, in the pen-and-ink study; but the want of ensemble and the insubordination of the insistent detail generally made his work less imposing when it ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... continued until 1851—ceased, that is to say, when Punch was ten years old. The wonder about them was that, even before the days of photography, the likenesses of his subjects were so admirable, and his thrusts so happy, while his art, criticised strictly, was so very poor and amateurish. But as exaggeration found no trace in his designs, and his compositions aimed at raising little more than a suspicion of a smile in the beholder (save in the subjects of them), the word "cartoon" was more ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... "amateurish mediocrity," and made war upon it, thus drawing jealous attacks upon himself. His great friend and ally, Nordraak, passed away in 1868, and the next year his baby daughter, aged thirteen months, the only child he ever had, ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... any kind sound amateurish in the business that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces me, therefore, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... supper may be served. If the actors are friends they join in the supper. But sometimes these private theatricals are not amateurish, but given by professionals, in which case the etiquette is somewhat different, and the performers may or may not be invited, ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... to me as I gazed that it was slowing down, out of spite. I longed to feel its pulses with a stop-watch in the other hand, and make sure. Could it be that, after all, Alb had changed his mind, and meant to betray me? No, it must be a trick of my amateurish fancy. ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... be amateurish at its best, for where could she possibly have learned to dance? What instruction could she, living in this out-of-the-way corner of the world, have received in the art? As for local enthusiasm, it counted for ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... answered Dick, who was really rather clever with his pencil and brush in an amateurish fashion. "He was something like this." And, whipping out his pocket-book, he rapidly produced a very spirited pencil ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... had to learn their own lesson in Champagne, but they were surprised to find how much the British had still to learn in July, 1916. The British officers excuse themselves because, they plead, they are still amateurs. "That is no reason," says the Frenchman, "why they should be amateurish." ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... deaden the spirit of offence. This is a truth so vital that some authorities in their eagerness to enforce it have travestied it into the misleading maxim, "That attack is the best defence." Hence again an amateurish notion that defence is always stupid or pusillanimous, leading always to defeat, and that what is called "the military spirit" means nothing but taking the offensive. Nothing is further from the teaching or the practice of the best masters. ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... the movement, erstwhile devoted primarily to organization of trade unions, entered, urged on by the Lassalleans, into a series of political campaigns somewhat successful at first but soon succumbing to the inevitable fate of all amateurish attempts. Upon men of Strasser's practical mental grasp these petty tempests in the melting pot could only produce an impression of sheer futility, and he turned to trade unionism as the only activity worth his while. Strasser had been elected ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... this self-regarding memory which had resulted in the play. It was obviously a personal experience, and as she was rich enough to share the risk of producing it, he was more than ready to put it on. It was full of faults; it was melodramatic, it was amateurish, but it was passionately alive. The pit and the gallery would love it; and if the stalls found it a little cheap, what of that? He had considerable flair. ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... the corporation wanted for commissioner. And your people elected him—saved the Railroad all the trouble of campaigning for him. And you can't make any counter charge of bribery there. No, sir, the corporation don't use such amateurish methods as that. Confidentially and between us two, all that the Railroad has done for Lyman, in order to attach him to their interests, is to promise to back him politically in the next campaign for ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... train-boy on the Grand Trunk railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any inclination ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... DeLancey's is poor amateurish stuff. Gibb's total income during the year would hardly exceed twenty-five dollars, and it doesn't do him much good at that. When he gets any money, he eats it up in the most determined and hasty fashion. I have seen him eat a dollar's worth of ham sandwiches in an afternoon—because ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... Illustrated by several original drawings. And to my relatives, and friends, respectfully subscribed. A later hand has written over the title the words, "The Overland Route to California." Among the numerous amateurish illustrations drawn by lead pencil and tinted with colors, three are reproduced here; also her three route maps. The other illustrations include the following: "The home I left behind me" (Her home in Illinois); "Crossing the Nimehaw"; "Killing ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... you mean, dear—thanks just the same. I mean those women tonight. They all seem to 'go in' for something—votes or charity or dancing or social service, or something—even the girls. And they all sounded so amateurish, so untrained, so unprepared, yet they seemed to be dreadfully ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... Reporters who scan the hotel list did not think "Mr. French of Nowhere" a subject worthy of dissection, so for a few days I thought I should enjoy perfect peace with profit. A "stocky little Englishman" taking notes en passant with an amateurish fervency was probably what most people would think who cared to think at all of the stranger in ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... won't let her pupils use those, though," said Netta. "She calls it an amateurish dodge. I should think we shall have to hold each other up while we ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil |
