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More "Dilettante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the old world awakening to spiritual life. Modern people have repeated the words more than enough, but by translating them too literally—"I loved to love"—they have perhaps distorted the sense. They have made Augustin a kind of Romantic like Alfred de Musset, a dilettante in love. Augustin is not so modern, although he often seems one of ourselves. When he wrote those words he was a bishop and a penitent. What strikes him above all in looking back upon his uneasy and feverish life ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... by 'dilettante' methods, but demands a mind spurred by ambition or the satisfaction ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... as an instance of 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; and his merits, very great in themselves, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... room was her bugbear. She had dignified it with the name of "studio," but it looked what it was—a workshop. Winslow Whitney, considered in clubdom as a dilettante and known to scientists as an inventor of ability, frowned impatiently as he observed his wife's ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... 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 ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... 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
... I determined that he should never know the truth. He could go back to South America and build bridges and make love to the Spanish girls (or are they Spanish down there?) and think of me always as a married woman, married to a dilettante artist, inclined to be stout—the artist, not I—and with an Aunt Selina Caruthers who made buttons and believed in the Cause. But never, NEVER should he think of me as a silly little fool who pretended that she was ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "art did not satisfy her, did not fill the void of her life. Genuine artists exist only for art, for the theatre.... Everything else pales before that which they regard as their vocation.... She was a dilettante!" ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... library is the room at the right of the door upon entering the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... less picturesque 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 ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... phrases of dialect interestingly allied to pure Anglo-Saxon. When this last occurred, he entered them in a notebook he kept in his library. He sometimes pretended to himself that he was going to write a book on dialects; but he knew that he was a dilettante sort of creature and would really never do it. The pretense, however, was a sort of asset. In dire moments during rains or foggy weather when he felt twinges and had read till his head ached, he had wished that he had not eaten all ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... congenial atmosphere around him, expanded to a gayety, a magnetic boyishness, that fascinated as much as it amazed the four who knew him as no others could; and sent Avelallement, a wealthy German dilettante, whose acquaintance with the famous Russian consisted of a long correspondence and a fanatical admiration of his work, back to his native Hamburg determined on bringing Ivan to Germany, in order that the most sentimental, hospitable and musical race in the world might come to know, as he ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... a copy, for his own 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 ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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
... and Bacon had done it. By Bacon he had justified to himself,—or rather had failed to justify to himself,—a seclusion from his family and from the world which had been intended for strenuous work, but had been devoted to dilettante idleness. And he had fallen into those mistakes which such habits and such pursuits are sure to engender. He thought much, but he thought nothing out, and was consequently at sixty still in doubt ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... let us say 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, familiar ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Of course; 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. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... is the tramp?" Who is the walking person seen from the vantage ground of these pages? He is necessarily a masked figure; he wears the disguise of one who has escaped, and also of one who is a conspirator. He is not the dilettante literary person gone tramping, nor the pauper vagabond who writes sonnets, though either of these roles may be part of his disguise. He is not merely something negligible or accidental or ornamental, he is something ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... 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 care much, nor believe much. You doubt about other men as much as about yourself. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The Minister-Prince complimented her graciously; he was a dilettante, who could express himself most charmingly, in well chosen, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... then," exclaimed he, "you are but a dilettante! Assassination in the abstract is well enough, but you have a disposition to shirk practical examples. I ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... 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 every part of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... instance of this nearness of the boy to the surface in him displayed itself one grey east-windy afternoon at Leven, when one saw quite another side to him than the literary and dilettante one displayed, with something of a mannered affectation, the day before in 'The Turret' drawing-room. He had walked down to the sands with his aunt and there were assembled various younger members of the Balfour clique, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... origin this for such a society, and the fruits will be without flavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered," will say some travelled dilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wonders of the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teaches a different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely, but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studded canopy of the earth, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... parting of the ways. She saw that her life was becoming an empty husk. I think the theater was palling on her. But I see now that she still cherished the dream of winning the man she loved—not me, her husband, but that handsome dilettante, Grant. I take it, therefore, that she went to Steynholme to determine whether or not the glamour of the past was really dead. Unfortunately, she witnessed certain idyllic passages between her one-time lover and a charming village girl. Imagine the effect of this discovery on one of the artistic ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... place at the time of the Restoration, burst on the servants of the Company. The humane man was horror-struck at the way in which they had got their money, the thrifty man at the way in which they spent it. The Dilettante sneered at their want of taste. The Maccaroni black-balled them as vulgar fellows. Writers the most unlike in sentiment and style, Methodists and libertines, philosophers and buffoons, were for once on the same side. It is hardly too much ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with 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
... new performance—'tis the last of seven. To give that number is the custom here: 'Twas by a Dilettante written, And Dilettanti in the parts appear. That now I vanish, pardon, I entreat you! As Dilettante ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... live a very short time. We live only one life. Only certain things are possible to us. The man who tries to crowd everything into that life fails. He is a dilettante. He may find pleasure but he reaches no end. He strikes no long sustained note. In the eyes of those who come after him, ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... accuracy of ancient verses, 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
... other neighbouring countries with an originally strongly Slav population of displaying a birch-tree at the beginning of May. The learned will then dive down into Slavonic mythology, which process to the dilettante in such matters, is like "going in off the deep end"—you never know when or where ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... 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. ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Rune poem some air of antiquity that it runs in the old Futhorc order. And, indeed, some of the versicles may perhaps be ancient; that is, they may possibly date from a time when Runes were still in practical use. But certainly much of this chaplet of versicles must be regarded as late and dilettante work. The Rune names are not all clearly authentic; for example, "Eoh" is rather dubious; but the poet treats the name as meaning Yew, and gives us an interesting little epigram ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... 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 however conspicuous, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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 their richness, and no ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation. It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner. Cabin-boy! I had never done any hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life. I had lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days—the life ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... will ever come here to study them. It is five hundred miles from the railroad. Therefore, I shall never have to endure the praises of the dilettante, the patronage of the idler, the vapid rhapsodies of the vulgar. Only those who understand will care to ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... this amazing document I lit my pipe and set to work to think it over. The hypothetical inquirer might ask why I thought it amazing. There was nothing odd in a dilettante Englishman of highly cultivated mind taking to Egyptology and, being, as it chanced, one of the richest men in the kingdom, spending a fraction of his wealth in excavating temples. Nor was it strange that he should have happened to die by accident when ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 limit in spite of protests, and when he lost one always had the feeling that he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... interest in art to be able to abandon it entirely. Before entering college, art was a passion, but when, at the age of twenty, the release gave me the liberty to throw myself into painting, the finer roots of enthusiasm were dead, and I became only a dilettante, for the years when one acquires the mastery of hand and will which make the successful artist ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... begin. The lawyer group—clerks and all—is excellent. Dickens' early experiences stood him in good stead here. Excellent too are those studies in the ways of impecuniosity and practical shiftlessness, Harold Skimpole, the airy, irresponsible, light-hearted epicurean, with his pretty tastes and dilettante accomplishments, and Mrs. Jellyby, the philanthropist, whose eyes "see nothing nearer" than Borrioboola-Gha, on the banks of the far Niger, and never dwell to any purpose on the utter discomfort of the home of her husband and children. Characters of this kind ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... 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 ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... a great deal that is too difficult for the dilettante, Marie Antoinette," sighed the queen. "Meanwhile, we will ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... young lady must have gone away with the idea that I was a combination of longshore lout and effeminate dilettante, with the financial resources of the former. She might as well have that idea as any other, I supposed, but, in her eyes, I must be more of a freak than ever. I should take care to keep out of the sight of those eyes as much as possible. But that the ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... formal but agreeable manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as Professor Chadd was of the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some credit under the circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a considerable experience of the more dilettante fashionable salons. But neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two grey-haired middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves about like acrobats as a substitute for an ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... when the writer himself overtook me at my hotel. For a moment I scarcely recognized him. A new suit of fashionably-cut clothes had changed him, without, however, entirely concealing his rustic angularity of figure and outline. He even affected a fashionable dilettante air, but so mildly and so innocently ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... commotion. On one side, the partisans from 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 ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... reason for his delay was a personal one. He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were; and on this occasion the ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... literature. I wanted to write, but I had no very pressing aspirations or inspirations. I may confess that I was indolent, fond of company, but not afraid of comparative solitude, and I was moreover an entire dilettante. I read a good many books, and tried feverishly to write in the style of the authors who most attracted me, I settled down at home, more or less, in a country village where I knew everyone; I travelled a little; and I paid occasional visits to ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... stroll—keeping within earshot of the house, so as to hear any possible outcry from the nursery. He had been on his feet all day. But he reflected that there was a real satisfaction in his family tasks, however gruelling. Now, at last (he said to himself), I am really a citizen, not a mere dilettante. Of course it is arduous. No one who is not a parent realizes, for example, the extraordinary amount of buttoning and unbuttoning necessary in rearing children. I calculate that 50,000 buttonings are required for each one before it reaches ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... 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, ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... that is only being nibbled at, smelt at, one might say, at the present moment," he observed, "but it is one that will have to engage our serious attention and consideration before long. The first thing that we shall have to do is to get out of the dilettante and academic way of approaching it. We must collect and assimilate hard facts. It is a subject that ought to appeal to all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it surprisingly difficult to ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... she had Craven 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 ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... there. In Paris he kept a journal for about three weeks; it records attendance upon a single lecture in botany and seventeen theatrical performances. Naturally his brothers could only see that he was an amiable, idle young fellow, who had drifted into a dilettante attitude toward life, and showed little promise of usefulness. But idling as well as industry has to be judged by its fruits. He was in a real sense seeing life, as he personally needed to see it, ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... of the Rancho de las Sombras was no dilettante. He was a "hustler." He was generally up, mounted, and away of mornings before the rest of the household were awake, making the rounds of the flocks and camps. This was the duty of the major-domo, a stately old Mexican with a princely air and manner, but Teddy seemed ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... only to look at." Demidoff "was a tall, thin man," continues Mr. Hacklaender, "with light, almost yellow, complexion, and always dressed with extreme elegance. On the occasion of our first visit to his town-house the princess was painting in her studio, in which art she was more than a dilettante. The prince went first to her with Demidoff, and after they had come back we heard from her a peal of the heartiest laughter, which rung down through five large rooms. Soon after she came out and greeted us in the kindest fashion. She was then a young and handsome woman, with a splendid ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... 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
... dilettante middle class, and mean to try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts. You will be ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... 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 ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said, "are one of those unpractical persons, who bring to the affairs of a purely utilitarian epoch the 'faineant' scruples of the dilettante and romanticist. You cannot regulate the flow of wealth any more than you can dam a river with shifting sand. Don't you know that destiny, whether it be guided by other powers or not, was never meant to be ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... upon me since I broke my own hip bone and know what it means," the old man went on. "With the help of my fellow-student there, from a mere dilettante I became a practised surgeon; and, what is more, I am one of those who serve Esculapius at my own expense. However, there are accessory reasons for which I have chosen such strange companions: deformed slaves are cheap and besides that, certain investigations ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 and interests ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... as that, sir. I should like 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 single ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... element." In the education and elevation of woman we are yet to learn the true manhood and womanhood, the true masculine and feminine elements. Dio Lewis is rapidly changing our ideas of feminine beauty. In the large waists and strong arms of the girls under his training, some dilettante gentleman may mourn a loss of feminine delicacy. So in the wise, virtuous, self-supporting, common-sense women we propose as the mothers of the future republic, the reverend gentleman may see a lack of what he considers the feminine ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... artificer, craftsman, handicraftsman, journeyman, mechanic, workman, laborer, operative, industrial. Antonyms: idler, drone, dabbler, sluggard, truant, dilettante, loafer, shirker. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... metropolitan musical attractions, comes the more silent reign of the picture exhibitions—those great art-gatherings from thousands of studios, to undergo the ultimate test of public judgment in the dozen well-filled galleries, which the dilettante, or lounging Londoner, considers it his recurring annual duty strictly to inspect, and regularly to gossip in. As places where everybody meets everybody, and where lazy hours can be conveniently lounged away, the exhibitions ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... and luxurious class exists in this country, and that it is less exempt than in our own from the reproach of preferring inglorious ease to the furtherance of liberal ideas. It is rapidly increasing, and I am not sure that the indefinite growth of the dilettante spirit, in connection with large and lavishly-expended wealth, is an unmixed good, even in a society in which freedom of development has obtained so many interesting triumphs. The fact that this body is not represented in the governing class, ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... 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. ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... Colonel's age. Durant knew a man who had taught himself the 'cello at fifty-five. But the Colonel was not that sort of adventurous dilettante. Neither was Mrs. Fazakerly exactly like a violoncello, she was more like a piano; while Miss Tancred, from the Colonel's point of view, was like a hurdy-gurdy. Not a difficult instrument the hurdy-gurdy; you have only to keep on turning a handle to make it ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... 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 ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... role was silence. If Cheriton didn't speak (and Cheriton's expression showed that he knew) and if Hilary didn't speak ... well, he, Peter, couldn't speak either. He must acquiesce in what appeared to be a conspiracy to keep this pathetic, worn-out dilettante in ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... unknown to fame 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 conviction. And ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... general level of Europeans who display curiosity about history or art. Which is probably true. But it ought to be remembered by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!) that the mass of us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly indifferent to history and art. The European dilettante goes to the Uffizi and sees a shopkeeper from Milwaukee gazing ignorantly at a masterpiece, and says: "How inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is to me! The American is an inartistic race!" But what about the shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens? The shopkeeper from ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Hush! Here is music to soothe your troubled spirit. Next to him, on this side, sits the dilettante composer, Mr. Trillo; they say his name was O'Trill, and he has taken the O from the beginning, and put it at the end. I do not know how this may be. He plays well on the violoncello, and better on the piano; sings agreeably; has a talent at versemaking, ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Saxe wrote his Reveries. This was a fine book for a soldier to write, and for that alone he would deserve praise, even if he had not beaten the English so gloriously. Mademoiselle Verrieres was an actress and Dupin de Francueil a dilettante. Aurore's grandmother, Marie-Aurore, was very musical, she sang operatic songs, and collected extracts from the philosophers. Maurice Dupin was devoted to music and to the theatre. Even Sophie-Victoire had an innate appreciation of beauty. She not only wept, like Margot, ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... with perpetual repose. It amuses like a panorama and soothes like an opiate, and when you have realised this you will understand why so many thousands of men around this island appear to spend all their time in watching tidal water. Lest you should suspect me of taking a merely dilettante interest in the view, I must add that I am ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... like, and the things I like are not always the 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
... immense care was given to his education, in which Lord Chatham personally interested himself; and he traveled widely. The result of this, on a very receptive mind with varied natural gifts, was to make Beckford an ideal dilettante. His tastes in literature, painting, music (in which Mozart was his tutor), sculpture, architecture, and what not, were refined to the highest nicety. He was able to gratify each of them as such a man can rarely have the means to do. He built palaces and towers of splendor instead of merely ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... squalor of the men and their surroundings was concerned, although it was at first something of a shock to me, I did not allow myself to be disconcerted on its account. I had no desire or ambition to be a mere dilettante Socialist, and as dirt and squalor had to be faced, well, I was ready to face them. A famous Russian writer has described a strange phase through which the Russian youth passed not many years since, the "V. Narod" ("To the People!") movement, when young men and girls by the thousands, some belonging ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... 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
... do not in the least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through what is happening to-day. I want to know what men thought and did in the thirteenth century, not out of any dilettante or idle antiquarian's curiosity, but because the thirteenth century is at the root of what men think and do in the nineteenth. Well then, it cannot be a bad educational rule to start from what is most interesting, and to work from that outwards and backwards. By beginning with the present we ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... 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 ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... vast building, like a dried kernel too small for its shell.' The place breathed imbecility, and unreality, and sleepy life-in- death, while the whole nineteenth century went roaring on its way outside. And as Lancelot thought, though only as a dilettante, of old St. Paul's, the morning star and focal beacon of England through centuries and dynasties, from old Augustine and Mellitus, up to those Paul's Cross sermons whose thunders shook thrones, and to noble Wren's masterpiece of art, he asked, 'Whither all this? ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Seth 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
... was very generally recognized as a discerning dilettante in most matters artistic. He was an excellent judge of literature, painting, and sculpture, . . his house, though small, was a perfect model of taste in design and adornment, . . he knew where to pick up choice bits of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... which had been begun earlier in the century, - finished it, I suppose, for 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 imbittered him nor quenched his faculty of enjoyment. He was ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... was the "odd man" of 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 to his speeches than to make any solid ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... 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 is ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... sorrow. The 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 or stint to their task; ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... 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 light. The effect was astounding. It was so brilliant that you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... is an excellent man, with a good heart and a knowledge ... but he has no character... and he will remain all his life half a savant, half a man of the world, that is to say, a dilettante, that is to say, to speak plainly,—neither one thing nor the other. ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... his contention to CHARLES PERRAULT (1628-1703), who had burlesqued the AEneid, written light and fragile pieces of verse, and occupied himself as a dilettante in patristic and historical studies. In 1687, after various skirmishes between partisans on either side, the quarrel assumed a new importance. The King had recovered after a painful operation; it was a moment for gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the Academy, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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 beautiful drawings, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... intellectual powers and widely recognized moderation. The Liberal papers said that the emptiness of Ulster's opposition to Home Rule might be gauged by the fact that it had welcomed the support of a dilettante lordling. ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... Mary went on reflectively, "comes from Marseilles. Rather a dangerous heredity, when one thinks of the Latin attitude towards women. But then, I sometimes wonder whether Denis is altogether serious-minded, whether he isn't rather a dilettante. It's very difficult. ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... nonce 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 ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... demarcation, demimonde, demoniac, denizen, denouement, deprecate, depreciate, derelict, derogatory, despicable, desuetude, desultory, deteriorate, diacritical, diagnosis, diaphanous, diatribe, didactic, diffusive, dilatory, dilettante, dipsomania, dirigible, discommode, discretionary, discursive, disintegrate, disparity, dispensable, disseminate, dissimulation, dissonant, distain, divagation, divination, divulge, dolor, dorsal, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... reading we have fallen into a fireside, dilettante culture of ideas as an intellectual pleasure. Amos and Isaiah do not deal in ideas. Their strength lies in love and hatred, in the keenness and depth of their division between right and wrong. They repeat the work of God the Creator: chaotic sameness ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... 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
... half-empty trunk the little cardboard boxes in which he kept the collection of playing-cards, and of all manner of outlandish equivalents for these simple instruments of fortune, picked up here and there during his two or three years of dilettante travelling in strange countries. At the same time he brought out a Japanese crystal ball, which he stood upon its silver tripod, placing it on a little table in one of the windows on each side of the fireplace; ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... is all upon one pattern; it is a wide ocean, indeed, but a 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. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... other creators appear simultaneously in clusters; production is abundant both in matter and in kind. At such times there is nothing withdrawn or particularly refined about the creations which pour forth. There is no room for the dilettante or petit maitre, and not much for the professional critic; it is the age of strong men; writing, painting, sculpture are ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... 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^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Outside Friend and Foe Light and Color Genius Beauteous Individuality Variety The imitator Geniality The Inquirers Correctness The Three Ages of Nature The Law of Nature Choice Science of Music To the Poet Language The Master The Girdle The Dilettante The Babbler of Art The Philosophies The Favor of the Muses ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... In that one small observation lies, for the connoisseur, the whole deep distinction between the true artist and the dilettante. To you, Margaret, our relation is today nothing more than the recollection of a few mad nights, a few deep talks of an evening in the alleys of the English Garden; I have made of it ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... 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 being expelled, we ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... been begun earlier in the century—finished it, I suppose, for consistency's sake, in the manner in which it had originally been designed rather than in accordance with the artistic tastes that formed the consolation of his old age. He was a painter, a writer, a dramatist, a modern dilettante, addicted to private theatricals. There is something very attractive in the image that he has imprinted on the page of history. He was both clever and kind, and many reverses and much suffering had not embittered him nor quenched ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... slough," which engulfs the manhood and womanhood of generation after generation is incapable of removal; and if the heart and intellect of mankind alike revolt against the fatalism of despair, then, indeed, it is time, and high time, that the question were faced in no mere dilettante spirit, but with a resolute determination to make an end of the ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the least precocious. I think that on the whole it was beneficial to him that his energies all lay fallow. My father, stern as his conception of duty was, had a horror of applying any intellectual pressure to us. I myself must confess that I was distinctly idle and dilettante both as a boy at Eton and as a Cambridge undergraduate. But much as my father appreciated and applauded any little successes, I was often surprised that I was never taken to task for my poor performances in work and scholarship. The truth was that my ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... anybody, was less 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, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... 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
... wool-work. It involved pain, resistance, a stern revision of things hitherto taken for granted. The secrets which they designed to wring from nature and from life were not likely to be revealed to the self-indulgent and the dilettante. The sisters had a message from the sphere of indignation and revolt. In order that they should learn it as well as teach it, it was necessary that they should arrive on the scene at an evil hour for their own happiness. Jane Eyre and Shirley and Villette ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... 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 ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... 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 ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... a dark-looking 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
... 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 ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... strong and vivid life. He was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his circumstances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a man of this varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a sorry creature enough; and Browning, far from taking his part and putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great bishop rolls him ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... still more beautiful one, and upon 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
... at, smelt at, one might say, at the present moment," he observed, "but it is one that will have to engage our serious attention and consideration before long. The first thing that we shall have to do is to get out of the dilettante and academic way of approaching it. We must collect and assimilate hard facts. It is a subject that ought to appeal to all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it surprisingly difficult to interest people ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... 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. ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... 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 in the neighbourhood of Bond Street at which his mother and his grandfather, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... away, walking very delicately, with his head drooping towards his left shoulder, and his hands dangling in a dilettante manner at his sides, Madame Valtesi appeared at the French window of the drawing-room, refusing to join Tommy in some boyish game. After a parleying, which she conducted in profile, she turned her full face round, and ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... on, with considerable loss of ease: "I suppose the accursed dilettante habit has got into my blood. I needed these unhappy days and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... offers a veritable California to the ardent naturalist, who finds there the rarest flora and fauna. My old friend used to visit this region every year, and stay there for weeks zealously collecting specimens: he invited me to share his autumn expedition. I am somewhat of a dilettante in this line, and as I had leisure, I accompanied my friend ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... 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
... showed no traces of that credulity 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 ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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
... The same 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 ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... 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 of their own taste, when they have agreed ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... exclaimed he, "you are but a dilettante! Assassination in the abstract is well enough, but you have a disposition to shirk practical examples. I have ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... being 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- attendant, room-keeper, masseur, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... said, "you forget I may not yet have had time to acquire certain of the—dilettante ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... own 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 sweet malt: how ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... 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
... the book, either described at some length or indicated by a masterly allusion. All kinds of girls are depicted, as all kinds of girls go to college—girls poor and rich, clever, dull, and commonplace, refined and unrefined, the unsubstantial and the dilettante, and those with genuine talent, and the life among them seems very real, for nothing is forced or strained in the stories. The trial scene in Professor Lamont is one of the cleverest bits of writing in any recent book of short stories, and it is a true picture ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... versifying, acting, and music were just as much within his reach as the learning and the career of a scholar; and the superficial inquirer into this stage of his life might even conclude that he was born to be a dilettante. The small world within the bounds of which he grew up was not of the kind we should choose to be the home of an artist. He ran the constant risk of becoming infected by that dangerously dissipated attitude of mind in which a person will taste of everything, as also by that condition of slackness ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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 has square, competent ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... 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
... now she drew it resolutely within, for with 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 ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... 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
... 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. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... confederate republic, 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 himself calculates that, in his harmonie all pleasures ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... herself about Basil. The Judge rather leaned to Basil's consideration. He understood that Dora's overt act had shattered his professional career as well as his personal happiness. He could feel for the man there. "My dears," he said, with his dilettante air, "the goddess Calamity is delicate, and her feet are tender. She treads not upon the ground, but makes her path upon the hearts of men." In this non-committal way he gave his comment, for he usually ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... his supper he still bore the outward appearance of an assistant cutter, though inwardly he felt a premonitory glow. After half-past seven, however, he buttoned on a low, turned-down collar with its concomitant broad Windsor tie, and therewith he assumed his real character—that of a dilettante. ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... peer of my well-known intellectual powers and widely recognized moderation. The Liberal papers said that the emptiness of Ulster's opposition to Home Rule might be gauged by the fact that it had welcomed the support of a dilettante lordling. ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... Dilettante will have been in boyhood a shorn lamb, for whom it was necessary to temper the wind of an English education by a liberal admixture of foreign travel. A prolonged course of interrupted studies will have filled him with culture, whilst a distaste for serious effort, whether mental ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... thing occurred the other evening," he smiled. "I had to pay for my oysters by writing a rhyme for the waiter." An anecdote by a dilettante, a gracefully turned plea worthy of M'sieur Bruinrmell. "You know, it grows more and more difficult to obtain employment. My wardrobe is practically gone." He glanced with apparent amusement at his weary-willie makeup. His hand ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... is in earnest 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 and heavily ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... until death released the most steadfast hero of that cruel war. Men speculate as to his religion. It was the religion of the seer, the hero, the patriot, and the lover of his race and time. Amid the political idiocy of the times, the corruption in high places, the dilettante culture, the vaporings of wild and helpless theorists, in this swamp of political quagmire, O Lincoln, it is refreshing to think ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... this—never had it been driven home into their conscience so that doubt or evasion was impossible. And this man, who was he? They rubbed their eyes and wondered. Ninth Marquis of Arranmore, owner of great estates, dilettante, sportsman, cynic, latter-day sinner—or an apostle touched with fire from Heaven to open men's eyes, gifted for a few brief minutes with the tongue of a saintly Demosthenes. Those who knew him gaped like children ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... use, partly only to look at." Demidoff "was a tall, thin man," continues Mr. Hacklaender, "with light, almost yellow, complexion, and always dressed with extreme elegance. On the occasion of our first visit to his town-house the princess was painting in her studio, in which art she was more than a dilettante. The prince went first to her with Demidoff, and after they had come back we heard from her a peal of the heartiest laughter, which rung down through five large rooms. Soon after she came out and greeted us in the kindest fashion. She was then a young and handsome ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Cornelius Chromatic, the most profound and scientific of all amateurs of the fiddle, with his two blooming daughters, Miss Tenorina and Miss Graziosa; Sir Patrick O'Prism, a dilettante painter of high renown, and his maiden aunt, Miss Philomela Poppyseed, an indefatigable compounder of novels, written for the express purpose of supporting every species of superstition and prejudice; and Mr Panscope, the chemical, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... 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 ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... 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
... long time the young composer was unsuccessful in his attempts to break through the barren and irritating drudgery of a schoolmaster's life. At last a wealthy young dilettante, Franz von Schober, who had become an admirer of Schubert's songs, persuaded his mother to offer him a fixed home in her house. The latter gratefully accepted the overture of friendship, and thence became a daily guest at Schober's house. He made at this time a number of strong friendships ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... Huntendunensis Historia Anglorum ... from A.C. 55 to A.D. 1154," ed. T. Arnold, Rolls, 1879, 8vo. Henry writes much more as a dilettante than William of Malmesbury; he seems to do it mainly to please himself; clever at verse writing (see above, p. 177), he introduces in his Chronicle Latin poems of his own composition. His ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... you to help me to get people to understand that realism is a method, and only methodic in its consequences; when the realist is an artist, that is, and supposing the idealist with whom you compare him to be anything but a FARCEUR and a DILETTANTE. The two schools of working do, and should, lead to the choice of different subjects. But that is a consequence, not a cause. See my chaotic note, which will appear, I fancy, in November ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... variety of that 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 explain, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... bequeathed his contention to CHARLES PERRAULT (1628-1703), who had burlesqued the AEneid, written light and fragile pieces of verse, and occupied himself as a dilettante in patristic and historical studies. In 1687, after various skirmishes between partisans on either side, the quarrel assumed a new importance. The King had recovered after a painful operation; it was a moment for gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the Academy, read his poem Le Siecle ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... time 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. ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... 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
... the motive, Marya Dmitrievna cried, "Charming!" but 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 ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... the best musicians.... Do you know, I think Blanche is the one man who has made a successful profession of being an amateur—unless one excepts Robert de la Condamine.... You can scarcely call a man who does so much a dilettante. Yes, I think he is an amateur ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... curiosity about history or art. Which is probably true. But it ought to be remembered by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!) that the mass of us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly indifferent to history and art. The European dilettante goes to the Uffizi and sees a shopkeeper from Milwaukee gazing ignorantly at a masterpiece, and says: "How inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is to me! The American is an inartistic race!" But what ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... 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, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... here; the spring has not begun properly yet, but we go about without our goloshes and fur caps. The tulips will soon be out. I have a nice garden but it is untidy, moss-grown—a dilettante garden. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... of Pesne's. Welcome, like one tiny islet of Reality amid the shoreless sea of Phantasms, to the reflective mind, seriously loving and seeking what is worthy and memorable, seriously hating and avoiding what is the reverse, and intent not to play the dilettante ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... would be old enough for Miss Barrington when we were fifty. The trouble is, that we spend half our time in play, and I've a notion it's a man, and not a gentleman dilettante, she's looking for." ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... his duty 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 ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... perhaps he was never more happily treated than when he enters as Harlequin, armed with a goose quill, and assisted by John Kemble and the famous Mrs. Siddons, in "Blowing up the Pic Nics." To the same class and subject of satire belongs the "Pic Nic Orchestra" and "Dilettante Theatre"—this last a Green-room scene which seems reminiscent of Hogarth's print of a similar subject. "Two-penny Whist" and "Push-pin" are filled with contemporary portraits;[11] and the two series of "Cockney Sportsmen" ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... 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, complaining ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... out of the forest, down by the bright river. It boasts a mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many sterlings. And the bridge is a piece of public property; anonymously famous; beaming on the incurious dilettante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have seen it in the Salon; I have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in the last French Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a black-and-white by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... words in his translation of Gil Blas, and that too strong an inference ought not to be drawn from the employment of Spanish phrases by Le Sage. But what are the words? Are they words in the mouth of every one, and such as a superficial dilettante might easily pick up; or do they, either of themselves or from the conjunctures in which they are employed, exhibit a consummate acquaintance with the dialect and habits of the people to which they refer? Besides, it should be remembered that French is a language far more familiar to well-educated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation. It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner. Cabin-boy! I had never done any hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life. I had lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days—the life ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... 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 diet. But now comes a different ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... his childhood, as a perfect connoisseur, a dilettante. He has told us how, as a child, in New York, Paris, London, and Geneva, he enjoyed more than anything else the "far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping." And, while giving us this picture of the small boy that was ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... at the centre of the situation. From the 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 ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... was silence. If Cheriton didn't speak (and Cheriton's expression showed that he knew) and if Hilary didn't speak ... well, he, Peter, couldn't speak either. He must acquiesce in what appeared to be a conspiracy to keep this pathetic, worn-out dilettante in ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... of art will ever come here to study them. It is five hundred miles from the railroad. Therefore, I shall never have to endure the praises of the dilettante, the patronage of the idler, the vapid rhapsodies of the vulgar. Only those who understand will care to ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... while his monograph upon the question, What Was the Original Cost of the Venus de Milo? had by his flatterers been pronounced the masterpiece of all known art essays for power and critical research. His was a prominent name upon the covers of dilettante art journals; it was he who effectually crushed young and too daringly independent artists; who repressed impertinent originality; who headed the hosts of conventionality against individuality or genius which held itself above the ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... 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 ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... a recognized dilettante, living only by and through music. Nicknamed "Il Fanatico." Known by the Duke and Duchess Cataneo and their ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... have been shortly after this that Marivaux returned to Paris to continue his studies, and possibly to prepare himself for the life of a literary dilettante. His means were sufficient to enable him to indulge his taste in this way. Here we find him admitted to the salon of Mme. de Lambert, held in her famous apartments, situated at the corner of the rue Richelieu and the rue ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... great difference between these ideas and Olivier's: but, by a secret instinct for balance and proportion, he was never so dilettante as when he heard provocative ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... 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 ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... friends, yours 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... notice your loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first law stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTE ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities. It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain- work. ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who are doing the work of the world. I believe in women as I believe in Christ. But I don't believe they were made—any more than Christ was—to cultivate—beyond a certain point—their own souls, and refine their own minds, and live in a sort of warmed-over, dilettante, stained-glass world of seclusion and exclusion. No, sir, that won't do for the United States and the men who are making them the greatest nation of the world. The men have got all the get-up-and-get they want, but they need the women to point them straight, and to show them how to lead that ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... prolonged course of interrupted studies will 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... him, as they saved many another noble soul, from that degradation. The events of 1560-1-2 forced Buchanan, as they forced many a learned man besides, to choose whether he would be a child of light or a child of darkness; whether he would be a dilettante classicist, or a preacher—it might be a martyr—of the Gospel. Buchanan may have left France in "the troubles" merely to enjoy in his own country elegant and learned repose. He may have fancied that he had found it, when he saw himself, in spite of his public profession of adherence to the Reformed ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the versicles may perhaps be ancient; that is, they may possibly date from a time when Runes were still in practical use. But certainly much of this chaplet of versicles must be regarded as late and dilettante work. The Rune names are not all clearly authentic; for example, "Eoh" is rather dubious; but the poet treats the name as meaning Yew, and gives us an interesting little epigram on ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... 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, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
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