"Dilettantism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The one person whom the public will not have in politics is the trifler. Think how many there have been, brilliant men, too, who have lost their places through a single false step, a single year, a month of dilettantism. Remind him of them. The man who moves in a great cause may move slowly, if you will, but he must move all the time. Remind him, too, that he is risking the one great chance of ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... illusion. Such a mode of proceeding has a look of dishonesty; it is nothing, however, but the good-tempered irony of a highly-cultivated mind, which will neither be ignorant of anything nor duped by anything. It is the dilettantism of the Renaissance in its perfection. At the same time what innumerable proofs of insight and of exultant ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... weighed his father, gave him a year, eighteen months, and that, not because he was anxious for his shoes, but out of sheer dilettantism. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Despite his dilettantism and dabbling in science, philosophy and letters, Evelyn had for years past felt the desirability of having some sort of fixed employment. Previous to this, during 1659, he had communicated to the Hon. Robert Boyle, son of the Earl of Cork, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish nobody. Enchanted St Ives' workhouses and Joe Manton aristocracies; giant-working mammonism near strangled in the partridge nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism—this, in all its branches, in its thousand thousand modes and figures, is a sight familiar to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... nor public indignation against the turpitude of slide-makers generally and that young Micky in particular, could avert his relatives' acknowledgments of their gratitude—what a plague thanks are!—from a benefactress who was merely consulting a personal dilettantism in her attitude towards her species, and who regarded Dave as her most remunerative investment for ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... contrasting sharply with the Miner's heavy and tentative slowness, the awkward self-consciousness of the Easy One, the Objector's furtive and apprehensive manner, or the Near-Collegian's languid affectation of dilettantism. ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... again he took up the question of social reform, and in "Smoke" ("Dim") he views with apprehension the actions of the so-called "intellectuals," who would make themselves responsible for the shaping of future Russia. Charlatans among the leaders of the new thought, and society dilettantism, both came under his merciless lash. In his opinion the men and ideas in the two camps are no more than smoke—dirty, evil-smelling smoke. The entire atmosphere is gloomy, and throughout is only relieved by the character of Irina, the most exquisite piece of feminine psychology in the whole range ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... compared with similar things in Scott. The book was not an historical romance, and the manners, sentiments, language, all were modern. Walpole knew little about the Middle Ages and was not in touch with their spirit. At bottom he was a trifler, a fribble; and his incurable superficiality, dilettantism, and want of seriousness, made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to such a subject as ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... assert that there may be some kind of soul-life independent of the body, and who are quite convinced that in such experiences of the soul there exists a connection with the life of the nervous system, which the "dilettantism of occult science" ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... make their taste prevail, they even wish to pose as judges in rebus musicis et musicantibus. Secondly: an ever increasing indifference towards severe, noble and conscientious schooling in the service of art, and in its place the belief in genius, or in plain English, cheeky dilettantism (—the formula for this is to be found in the Mastersingers). Thirdly, and this is the worst of all: Theatrocracy—, the craziness of a belief in the pre-eminence of the theatre, in the right of the theatre to rule supreme over the arts, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... malignity, dexterous portraiture, and happy imagery, in the whole compass of the English language. It is said, and by those well informed, that Rogers used to bore Byron while in Italy, by his incessant minute dilettantism, and by visits at hours when Byron did not care to see him. One of many wild freaks to repel his unreasonable visits was to set his big dog at him. To a mind like Byron's, here was sufficient provocation for a satire. The subject, too, was irresistible. Other inducements were not wanting. No man ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... that can part with him in declared enmity? Let us confess, there is that in the wild, much-suffering, much-inflicting man, which almost attaches us. His attitude, we will hope and believe, is that of a man who had said to Cant, Begone; and to Dilettantism, Here thou canst not be; and to Truth, Be thou in place of all to me: a man who had manfully defied the "Time-Prince," or Devil, to his face; nay perhaps, Hannibal-like, was mysteriously consecrated from birth to that warfare, and now ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... seem, then, that love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other countries, and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in defence of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian dilettantism which repels me in the very depths of my being. No! Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love their country, but rather that I should honour them, and seek ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... 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 felt its merit—to act under a general interest in all branches of knowledge, not a commercial ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sense of the word, in which sense it is never dissociated from gentleman. When, as in the present instance, scholarship is united with a deep and active interest in whatever concerns the practical well-being of men, we have one of the best results of our modern civilization. We are no lovers of dilettantism, but we see in these scholarly tastes and habits which do not seclude a man from the duties of real life and useful citizenship the only safeguard against the evils which the rapid heaping-up of wealth is sure to bring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... Effi desired to become a painter, in spite of the precentor's daughter from Polzin, whose conceit as an artist she still remembered as exceedingly disagreeable. Although she laughed about the plan herself, because she was conscious she could never rise above the lowest grade of dilettantism, nevertheless she went at her work with zest, because she at last had an occupation and that, too, one after her own heart, because it was quiet and peaceful. She applied for instruction to a very old professor of painting, who was well-informed concerning ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... at Baines's. None of them gave orders for printing, nor had preferences in the form of ledgers, nor held views on Victor Hugo, nor drank wine, nor yearned for perfection in the art of social intercourse. To Edwin, who was just beginning to touch the planes of worldliness and of dilettantism in art, to Edwin, with the mysterious and haughty creature at his elbow, they seemed to have no more in common with himself and her than animals had. And he wondered by virtue of what decree he, in the Shillitoe suit, and the grand house waiting for him ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... arguments presented in juxtaposition. No sooner had one speaker convinced his hearers that women would precipitate anarchy by their radicalism than the next proved equally conclusively that an era of dilettantism and millinery shop legislation would be the inevitable result of woman suffrage; no sooner were they filled with the horror of the degradation of politics by the class of women certain to participate in it, than another speaker assured them that politics ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... life divine and the wondrous symbols thereof. And the grass here is not cut and trimmed as in the artificial gardens and the cold dull lawns of city folk, whose love for Nature is either an experiment, a sport, a business, or a fad. 'A dilettantism in Nature is barren and unworthy,' says Emerson. But of all the lovers of Nature, the children are the least dilettanteish. And every day here I see a proof of this. Behold them wading to their knees in that lusty grass, hunting ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and suitable homage of cleanness and fit adornment. It is only when this homage becomes mere eye-service, when a book radically unworthy of such dignity is too delicately cultivated, too richly bound, that a poor dilettantism comes in between the reader and what he reads. Indeed, the best of volumes may, in my estimation, be destroyed as a possession by a binding so sumptuous that no fingers dare to open it for perusal. To the feudal splendours of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, a tenpenny book ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... he received this letter, he can hardly have been in a mood to respond sufficiently to its minute and overflowing dilettantismo. The amiability and polite affectionateness, perceptible even yet through the dilettantism, may have been pleasant to him; and he may have noted the subtle and delicate expression of sympathy with his domestic unhappiness which seems to be conveyed in the passages quoted, as if by accident, from Petrarch, Horace, Chiabrera, and Tibullus. Dati may ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... one of his letters, "is weary of its holiday. There are times when I long for the smell of gunpowder, and the thunder of battle. I am sick to death of churches and picture-galleries, operas, dilettantism, white-kid-glovism, and all the hollow shows and seemings of society. Sometimes I regret having left the army—at others I rejoice; for, after all, in these piping times of peace, to be a soldier is to ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards |
