"Dilettante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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 events ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... from their midst the Dilettante stalks abroad. The Amateur is loosed. The voice of the Aesthete is heard in the land, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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; ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... 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 could not have flourished in de Vere's ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... 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 his faculty of enjoyment. He was fond of his sweet Provence, and ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... 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
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 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 was connected with things dark and hidden, a thought ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... 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 of the seventeenth ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... 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
... parts 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. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 found a bit of classical wisdom ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... 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 ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... 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, effort to provide the people ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... so far and no farther. It's a long time ago and all the people Bassett knew at that time had scattered to the far corners of the earth. But that book struck dad all of a heap. It fitted into what he had heard about Bassett as a dilettante book collector; even then Bassett was interested in such things. And you know in that account of him you wrote in the 'Courier' that I told you I had read on the other side that first time we met? Well, when dad and I went to the Adirondacks it was only partly on my account; he met ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... Bolshevists. He called them "inferno-human beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Mr. Cornelius Chromatic, the most 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, a compounder of novels written for the express purpose of supporting every species of superstition and prejudice; and Mr. Panscope, the chemical, botanical, geological, astronomical, critical ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... 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: ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... and reporter many sorts of people, high and low, little and big, queer and commonplace, fell in my way; statesmen and politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders and prize fighters; the riffraff and the elite; the professional and dilettante of the world ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... train and Philadelphia she hardly remembered. She was miserably sick at soul, miserably mortified. Her foolish air-castles vanished, and in their stead she saw the brutal reality. She had deserted a young genius for a fashionable dilettante. In time she might have learned to care for Arthur—but how was she to know this? He was so backward, such a colorless companion!... She almost disliked the man who had taken her away from him; yet six months ago Ellenora would have resented the notion that a mere man could have led her. Besides ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... filled 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 ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... was a dilettante who left the government of the kingdom to his favorite, Alvaro de Luna. He gained more fame in the world of letters than many better kings by fostering the study of literature and gathering about him a circle of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... to the learned and illustrious lady, Isabella of Mantua. Marcantonio was no pedant, but these treasures simply had their place in the richly painted cabinet, beside many other bits of exquisite workmanship, because rare things in every art were beautiful to our dilettante, and possessions of all kinds came to ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the wilderness had come a painter. Genius, whose coronations alone are democratic, had woven a chaplet of chaparral for the brow of Lonny Briscoe. Art, whose divine expression flows impartially from the fingertips of a cowboy or a dilettante emperor, had chosen for a medium the Boy Artist of the San Saba. The outcome, seven feet by twelve of besmeared canvas, stood, gilt-framed, in ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... there, 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 of things as really being, with important ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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
... on his shoes, Des Hermies remarked, "To me the striking thing about the so-called literary world of this epoch is its cheap hypocrisy. What a lot of laziness, for instance, that word dilettante has ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... cannot help finding the artist visitor, that product of the bloom of Boston civilization, a little hackneyed and time-worn. He has surely done his part in literature, and may retire to the heaven of the dilettante. But all the inhabitants of Marsh Island are human and attractive, and the untiring industries of the well-ordered household soothe one like the rhythm of a song. The bizarre, incongruous, but, upon the whole, satisfactory specimen of New England "help" which Miss Jewett ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... possible application of life, to purposes and ends; but there is no life for its own sake. Let me illustrate. It is, I have read, a maxim of American business that "a man is damned who knows two things." "He is almost a dilettante," it was said of a student, "he reads Dante and Shakespeare"! "The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but they show the way the wind blows. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... dilettante middle class, and mean to try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts. You will ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... very long 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
... enthusiasm was spent over forms and words and appearances of beauty. In them the senses were quickened, but not the heart, nor the reason. Therefore the spirit of the Reformer was not in them, but the spirit of the Dilettante only. And the poet was grieved and angry with them, because every true poet is a Reformer; and he went forth and spoke aloud in their public places and rebuked the dwellers in that town. But except a few curiosity hunters and some ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... got 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 does make sweet malt: how ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 am a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... relief the peculiarities of their model. When de Banville revives a forgotten form of verse—and he has already had the honour of reviving the ballade—he does it in the spirit of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of thought and make historic forgeries. With the ballade this seemed natural enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to Villon, and Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... be asked whether the American school system is in this respect unfavourably distinguished from that of any other country; and it must not be forgotten that even instruction in ordinary topics stimulates the soil for more valuable growths. The methods of the Salvation Army do not appeal to the dilettante; but it is more than possible that the grandchildren of the man whose imagination has been touched, if ever so slightly, by the crude appeal of trombones out of tune and the sight of poke-bonnets and backward-striding maidens, will be more ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 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 merits ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... 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 from a consciousness ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 us look more closely at our own beliefs and reassess their ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... 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. What ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... grown to be a very different thing from that weak beginning, but its national air is as popular as ever. The people do not merely love it. They glory in it. And yet apologies are sometimes made for it. By whom? By the soulless dilettante. The people know better:—the farmers, the mechanics, the fishermen, the dry-goods clerks, the newsboys, the railway stokers, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick-makers, the tinkers, the tailors, the soldiers, the sailors. Why? Because this music has a voice ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... of the crossed steel must be very distant in memory, and yourself in a most dilettante frame of mind, for you to be accessible to the music of that thin skeleton's clank. Nevertheless, it is better and finer even at the time of action, than the abominable hollow ogre's eye of the pistol-muzzle. We exchanged passes, the prince chiefly attacking. Of all the things to strike ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... any large available experience in manual labor or in specialised industries, the present Assembly feels the lack. The Filipino leaders are a body of polished gentlemen, more versed in law than in anything else, with varying side lines of dilettante tastes ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... 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
... inherit it than the rich had.—To these people at the Hall, I did not seem acceptable. I might in time do something with Judy, but the old lady was still so dreadfully repulsive to me that it troubled my conscience to feel how I disliked her. Mr Stoddart seemed nothing more than a dilettante in religion, as well as in the arts and sciences—music always excepted; while for Miss Oldcastle, I simply did not understand her yet. And she was so beautiful! I thought her more, beautiful every time I saw her. But I never appeared to make the least progress towards any ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... called chic, with a funny little foreign accent, which seemed to put new life into the wornout word. Twenty times a day she baited her hook, and twenty times a day some fish would bite, or at least nibble, according as he was a fortune-hunter or a dilettante. Miss Nora, being incapable of knowing the difference, was ready to capture good or bad, and went about dragging her slaves at her chariot- wheels. Sometimes she took them rowing, with the Stars and Stripes floating over her boat, by ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... the little, bitter-tongued man mobbed. But to his vast surprise not a word was said, and the dilettante hunters faded away one by one. The little man turned to Schoverling with a bristling laugh ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... we can impress people with them, or, at all events, impress people with a sense of our enjoyment of them. There is a noble piece of character-drawing in one of Mr. Henry James's novels, The Portrait of a Lady, where Gilbert Osmond, a selfish dilettante, finding that he cannot make a great success or attain a great position, devotes himself to trying to mystify and provoke the curiosity of the world by retiring into a refined seclusion, and professing that it affords him an exquisite kind of enjoyment. The hideous vulgarity of his attitude ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 astounding the idea ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... 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 ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... own father had failed in 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 ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... renders possible. The man of "independent means" cannot on the average keep his life in his body nearly so long as the half-starved, ill-housed agricultural labourer, from whose labour he draws the rents which keep him in idleness. The same law applies in the intellectual world. The dilettante person who tries to extract unceasing increments of intellectual or aesthetic enjoyment from books or pictures or travel, without the contribution of steady, painful intellectual effort, fails to win an intellectual life, for the mere automatic process of collecting the knowledge ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... 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 ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... my books quickly and returned them at the central desk. My self-consciousness had returned, and I was anxious to be away from the observation of the many dilettante readers who found my appearance more engrossing than the books with which they were dallying on some pretext ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... 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
... himself, all his previous experiences and education were but a novitiate in preparation for the great moment when truth challenged his consciousness and illuminated a path for him to follow. From an intellectual dilettante, a connoisseur of the many fruits which grace life's highway, he had become a single-purposed man aflame with burning idealism. From the sources of heredity the spirit of the Netherlands fighting against the yoke of Spain, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... calculating the value of notes (musical ones) has seized a Parisian dilettante, who, according to the Furet de Londres, has been fixing the price of every note and rest in certain pieces played by Paganini recently, at a concert given at the Opera at Paris, which produced him 16,500 francs. The following is the result:—He performed, during the evening, three pieces, each ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... 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 of attitude—especially in a storyteller. No artist is likely to be entirely admirable who ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... 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 light upon the various glass dishes, tubes, and slides, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sympathy with a Khalif than with a Colonel. He dwells in the romantic regions of life; but the romance is real. The hope is a true hope. The dream is a true dream. The picture is a painting, and not a chromo. The love is a passion, and not a dilettante episode. Cawein's art is a genuine art. His verse is exquisite. Out of the three hundred and thirteen poems in the five volumes under consideration there may be found hardly a false or broken harmony...."—JOHN CLARK RIDPATH, ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... handicraftsman, journeyman, mechanic, workman, laborer, operative, industrial. Antonyms: idler, drone, dabbler, sluggard, truant, dilettante, loafer, shirker. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Gillray's political caricatures; but 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
... projecting through Holland and Belgium, and which was to land him finally in the Austrian Tyrol. He would work his way later to Rome and Florence and Venice, and he would keep Norway for the following year; and he would travel about in the desultory, dilettante sort of fashion that suited him best now. He would probably go to America, and see Niagara and all the wonders of the New World, that was so young and fresh in its immensity. Indeed, he would go anywhere and everywhere, until his trouble became a thing of ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or shouting at the top of their voices, "O bel ange, ma Lucie!*" Then Leon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tambourini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his grand outbursts, ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... composition. It has been said that Smollett has left many French 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, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... 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 of their own taste, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... is added, "he is less ideal than saucy and conceited." Those who like myself knew only the solemnity of the painter in advanced years have a difficulty in supposing in the child such traits compatible. These songs of the domestic affections were set to music; the father, as a dilettante complete, cultivated all the harmonies whether of thought, form, or sound; the ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... 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
... loved one above the world. The term "My Beloved" is singularly universal, and seems to spring involuntarily to the lips of the lover when his love is of the quality that reverences; adores; and exalts its object. And it is equally foreign to the lips of the dilettante lover. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Jesuit Santa Clara) of the period it refers to.—There were various Jesuits Santa Clara, of that period: this is the German one, Abraham by name; specimens of whose Sermons, a fervent kind of preaching-run-mad, have been reprinted in late years, for dilettante purposes, (Note of 1845.)] ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... so rapidly have attained to such perfection had not the old geographers shown them the way. The influence of the existing Italian geographies on the spirit and tendencies of the travellers and discoverers was also inestimable. Even the simple 'dilettante' of a science— if in the present case we should assign to Aeneas Sylvius so low a rank—can diffuse just that sort of general interest in the subject which prepares for new pioneers the indispensable favourable predisposition in the public mind. True discoverers in any ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... 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
... him in a smiling silence. He—the man of religion—was unwilling in these surroundings to play the prophet, to plunge into the central stream of argument. But Norham, the outsider and dilettante, was conscious of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... 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 him for a popinjay, that in every company of master workmen ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... misfitting coat to him was as grievous as a misplaced verb in a peroration. He superficially loved many things. Life was to him, even apart from politics, a gracious delight. He knew how to pose, to feign affability and to be sincere. With more culture Laurier would have been the most exquisite dilettante of his age. But he cared little for poetry in verse, not much for fine music, had small taste for objets d'art or the precious in anything. His greatest affection was in his home, his greatest charm in ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... period, he contributed a series of essays and critiques upon the science and practice of music, which raised the journal into a reference and an authority in the art. He wrote for the proprietors of the "Atlas" that elegant little book of dilettante criticism, "A Ramble among the Musicians in Germany." He latterly contributed to the "Musical Times" a whole series of masterly essays and analyses upon the Masses of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But the work upon which his reputation ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... women dance naked on the sands of the Sahara beneath the stars while celebrating the sacred rites of their festivals, but it soon became apparent that, all with few exceptions, were mere novices in comparison, and stood in about the same relation to her as a dilettante does to ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... gold-work in his cabinets. This patronage of contemporary art, no less than the appreciation of classical monuments, marked him as a Maecenas of the true Renaissance type.[1] But the qualities of a dilettante were not calculated to shed luster on a Pontiff who spent the substance of the Church in heaping up immensely valuable curiosities. His thirst for gold and his love of hoarding were so extreme that, when ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... to repent of his too easy taking of matters in the beginning. Not that he had a suspicion of Rex, but that he had remembered that Dick was always a loose fish. The even current of the dilettante's life became disturbed. He grew pale and hollow-eyed. His digestion was impaired. He ceased to take the interest in china which the importance of that article demanded. In a word, he grew despondent as to his fitness for his mission in life. Lady ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... discover a thousand ridiculous dirtinesses in my character (mille ridicole porcherie)." Another day he notes down, after describing the mean envy with which he has listened to the praises of another member of his little club of dilettante authors: "I do believe that as much praise as is being given and will ever be given to all mankind for every sort of praiseworthy thing, I should like to snap up for myself alone." Again, another day he writes: "More lazy than ever. Walking with a friend, and talking about our incomes, &c. I ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... thrown off his habitual air of grave reserve, and, responding to the friendly and congenial atmosphere around him, expanded to a gayety, a magnetic boyishness, that fascinated as much as it amazed the four who knew him as no others could; and sent Avelallement, a wealthy German dilettante, whose acquaintance with the famous Russian consisted of a long correspondence and a fanatical admiration of his work, back to his native Hamburg determined on bringing Ivan to Germany, in order that the most sentimental, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... round of conventional pleasures which the reader and his humble servant have mixed in deeply or dilettante, according to his taste or capacity for such giddy work. There was withal the usual heart-burning, heart-bartering, heart—anything you will but breaking. For we have not breaking hearts among us to-day. Providence, it would seem, has run short of the ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 interest people ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... perceive that he had undertaken that journey in imitation of the other—perhaps in the hope of finding in those distant, hard places the secret of Lawrence Teck's attractiveness. And, in fact, he looked stronger in spirit as well as in body. The hypochondriac, the timid dilettante, seemed to have slunk away; in his place stood a man who had forced himself, against all his natural instincts, to endure extremes of cold and heat, dirt and famine, hardship and danger. Even now his face was calm; but he could not keep his eyes ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... 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 engaged in ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... ideas, 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
... eyes, added to his dull regard for the verbal 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 ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... action, not of intellect, lives what he believes, and has no sympathy for those who waver or question—a thoroughly admirable, practical, and extremely irritating man. Adrian is the fascinating dilettante, the philosophic doubter, a sort of romantic rationalist with a taste for art. Of course, Rhona marries the brother who needs conversion, and their gradual influence on each other is indicated by a few subtle touches. Then we have the curious story of Olga, Adrian Mowbray's first love. She is ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... less, that 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
... 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 me ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... a more refined cruelty; but if this was the case Cardinal Ippolito II. completely deceived his contemporaries and has left the reputation (through the pen of his panegyrist Mureto) of the utmost affable condescension and magnificent patronage of men of genius. He was himself a dilettante; and it was his ambition to pose as the most cultured and brilliant of the great cardinals of his day. Ippolito I. had been a boon companion of Leo X. in his hunting parties at the Villa La Magliana, but it was not as a "cacciator signorile" or "sporting gentleman" ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... dedicated to another illustrious name, the elder Lucullus, not long deceased—half-statesman, half-dilettante, "with almost as divine a memory for facts", says Cicero, with something of envy, "as Hortensius had for words". This time it is at his villa, near Tusculum, amidst scenery perhaps even now the loveliest of all Italian landscapes, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... 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 his cake at the first course of life's feast, that ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of rootless art he practised. Some of the patterns he produced are delightful, but they are without imagination, without passion, without joy in the material and visible world—the dainty diversions of a dilettante. One is glad that so gracefully slender an art should exist, but if it has seemed great art to us it is because our age is so poor in anything better. To rank its creator with the abounding masters of ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... Kendricks, who was always pleasant; he was willing to talk about something besides himself, and had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others. In that group of impassioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and comfort—with his harmless dilettante intention of some day writing a novel, and his belief that he was meantime collecting material ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to understand and to explain. I 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... and there 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 the other man's wife and had a lump in her throat ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the scene of that episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted to handle the talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that, at her corner, he had felt the dilettante's irresistible craving to take a last look at a work of art that was passing out of ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... be such; Mr. Pseudo-Statesman, Placeman, Party Leader, Wirepuller; Mr. Amateur Statesman, Dilettante Lord, Civil Servant; Mr. Clubman, Litterateur, Newspaper Scribe; Mr. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... above-mentioned wind instruments in the symphony. The modern treatment of the piano with the introduction of the perfect chord accelerated its victory at the same time. It worked favorably for the external brilliancy of tone of this instrument, while gradually closing the ears of the dilettante and the musician to the charms of a simple but characteristic management of the voice in accordance with the rules of counterpoint. Thus the layman nowadays has seldom an ear for the subtleties of the string quartet, whereas, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... we have to expect from this book. Not the soft, flabby, indifferent, contradictory objectivity of the scientific dilettante, of the arch-eunuch: but a mettlesome objectivity which is appropriate in this fighting age, the objectivity of one who honestly attempts to see everything and to know everything; but who, having done so, endeavours to organise his data in accordance with a hypothesis, ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland |
