Amateurs Quotes & Sayings

I did an 'Our Town' in San Diego in the seventies with amateurs that I can tear up just thinking about. — Jack O'Brien

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals. — Jacques Barzun

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never! — Edna Ferber

I think the Chinese are really amateurs when it comes to running markets. — David Wessel

Last night, President Bush gave a prime-time press conference. It was such a big deal that Fox decided to preempt American Idol. Which made sense to me, you don't want too many amateurs on in one night. — David Letterman

True artists unburden their envies and work toward encouraging amateurs. — Aniruddha Sastikar

I never once went to a prostitute, maybe because so many enthusiastic amateurs were around. — Alexander Sutherland Neill

Amateurs practice until they get it right.
Professionals practice until it can't go wrong. — Julie Andrews

90% of the people in the stock market, professionals and amateurs alike, simply haven't done enough homework. — William O'Neil

We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateurs natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. — Jacques Barzun

It is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering. — Charles Robert Maturin

History - the product, not the raw material - is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them. — Neal Ascherson

Most great art is freedom within form. Without form, we are amateurs, without freedom, we are robots. — Donald Miller

Even virtue is an art; and even its devotees are divided into those who practise it and those who are merely amateurs. — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs. — Anne Tyler

When we're living as amateurs, we're running away from our calling - meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves. Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure. — Steven Pressfield

LSU fans have descended upon Dallas and reminded us of this truth: when it comes to partying, they're the pros and we're all amateurs. — Pat Forde

and we must endeavour to persuade those who are to be the principal men of our State to go and learn arithmetic, not as amateurs, but they must carry on the study until they see the nature of numbers with the mind only; — Plato

Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work. — Chuck Close

My main objective is to prepare candidates for professional baseball; however, the majority of our graduates will go home as much better qualified amateurs. — Jim Evans

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable. — Ernest Hemingway,

Sometimes, I wish we were all amateurs again. I'd play for nothing. Ab-so-lute-ly free. But that's not the system. — Dan Marino

In boxing, where most of the guys are from lower-class backgrounds and have darker skin than most of the fans, one might fear that the athletes are being exploited. But that narrative doesn't hold up very well in the world of MMA, where 99 percent of fighters are amateurs who will never earn a dime. They aren't seeking fame and fortune. For the most part, these guys are fighting because they want to and because it gives them an opportunity to strive for something big in their lives. It gives them a chance to become their best selves. — Jonathan Gottschall

The best wood in most amateurs' bags is the pencil. — Chi Chi Rodriguez

Even our behavior and emotions seem to have been shaped by a prankster. Why do we crave the very foods that are bad for us but have less desire for pure grains and vegetables? Why do we keep eating when we know we are too fat? And why is our willpower so weak in its attempts to restrain our desires? Why are male and female sexual responses so uncoordinated, instead of being shaped for maximum mutual satisfaction? Why are so many of us constantly anxious, spending our lives, as Mark Twain said, "suffering from tragedies that never occur"? Finally, why do we find happiness so elusive, with the achievement of each long-pursued goal yielding not contentment, but only a new desire for something still less attainable? The design of our bodies is simultaneously extraordinarily precise and unbelievably slipshod. It is as if the best engineers in the universe took every seventh day off and turned the work over to bumbling amateurs. — Randolph M. Nesse

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong. — Meredith Willson

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security. — Bruce Schneier

Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration. — Frank Yerby

Caring for others tends to be the first cut when we review our personal time budget. It does not necessarily fulfill the goals of my ambition; it will not pave the way for my success; it takes away from my own depleted emotional resources. It is an imposition in every way. To some of us, it is an inconvenience from which we unashamedly run. We have become experts in maintaining a grand scope of friendships and amateurs in genuine intimacy and care. Unwittingly, we have sacrificed everything on the altar of self-sufficiency - only to discover that we have sold our souls to isolation. — Sandy Oshiro Rosen

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Amateurs go broke taking large losses, professionals go broke taking small profits. — William Eckhardt

For far too long the House of Commons has been run as little more than a private club by and for gentleman amateurs. — John Bercow

In war, as in prostitution, amateurs are often better than professionals. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs. — Antonin Scalia

[About John Evershed] There is much in our medallist's career which is a reminder of the scientific life of Sir William Huggins. They come from the same English neighbourhood and began as amateurs of the best kind. They both possess the same kind of scientific aptitude. — Hugh Newall

Nobody was born a master; amateurs become experts because they did not give up on learning. You are going as far as you can if you'll learn and apply! — Israelmore Ayivor

[Eugene] O'Neill made a living, certainly, at least. But each of these forms have sort of died the death in turn, and it's a simple fact of that universe that talent then migrates away from these forms, and then the amateurs get in, like lunatics in the ruins, sort of pretending to be artists. If you're ambitious enough to want to be a writer to begin with, you want to be a writer in some circumstances where there are rewards, where there's notice, where you don't have to be a teacher, and where you're frankly not nuts for wasting your time. — William Monahan

I was always scared in the amateurs, but the minute I got in the ring it was like another person took over. I become more vicious. In there I love to hurt people. Outside I can't hurt a bug. — Nonito Donaire

Vision is easy. Ideas are even easier. It's execution that separates the amateurs from the pros. — Blaine Hogan

Sitting around waiting for inspiration is for amateurs. If you're a professional, you show up every day at work. — Mara Altman

Amateurs train until they get it right.
Professionals train until they cannot get it wrong. — Jose N. Harris

Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs . — Aldo Leopold

I don't believe in inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. Some of the time you know you're cooking, and the rest of the time, you just do it. — Chuck Close

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. — Chuck Close

The British public has always had an unerring taste for ungifted amateurs. — John Osborne

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it's turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur's spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown. — Austin Kleon

Perhaps the old fogies in the blogosphere get that way because, well, we stop taking the whole megillah so seriously. And we can't take it seriously because, well, this isn't our primary means of employment and never will be. Once the blogosphere is run by sufficient numbers of people who are paid to blog, us enlightened amateurs just look semi-pro. — Daniel Drezner

The amateurs discuss tactics: the professionals discuss logistics — Napoleon Bonaparte

An astute trader aims to enter the market during quiet times and take profits during wild times. That, of course, is the total opposite of how amateurs act: they jump in or out when prices begin to run, but grow bored and not interested when prices are sleepy. — Anonymous

A lot of amateurs are terrified of going up against a player who is clearly better than they are. They never play their best, because they aren't comfortable. There's one surefire way to get over that, and it's to ask yourself, 'What if I beat him?' Imagine the possibility. — Fuzzy Zoeller

Without professionalism I'd be an amateur, and the clients I want don't hire amateurs. — David Airey

There are a lot of things that can be learned from the darker corners of athletics. You have doctors who view bodybuilders as cavalier amateurs of science. And then you have the bodybuilders who view the doctors as too conservative to do anything interesting. So I've tried to become the middleman for putting some of those pieces together. — Timothy Ferriss

There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work. — Patti Smith

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities. — Havelock Ellis

You are the antidote to any received behaviour. Take a walk when you can. Be alone when you can. Talk to people you care about when you can. We try our best, and somehow it's not enough. We are broken people, the theater shows this. Yet we don't let being inadequate keep us from giving our very best every time. If professionalism has taken the practice of performing to a place where broken human behavior is not acceptable, then it is the medium that is broken, and not the other way around.

For at our essence, at our core, we are not professionals. We are amateurs. We are myth, history and advertising, but, still, we exist; we are real, and we are simply beginners. It's how we thrive. We begin and therefore perpetually remain connected to the spark. We ask questions, we thirst, and we learn. And the dissenters complete us, causing us to be better. — Richard Maxwell

The tactics ... no, amateurs discuss tactics, ... Professional soldiers study logistics. — Tom Clancy

For most adult amateurs trying to keep their heels down forces their feet forward which throws them out of balance. — Michael Schaffer

Inspiration is for amateurs. professionals work everyday. Personally the best inspiration is a deadline. — Chuck Close

No other great master has been so misunderstood by the vast majority of chess amateurs and even by many masters, as has Emanuel Lasker. — Jose Raul Capablanca

I love mixing amateurs and professionals. — Lasse Hallstrom

Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs. — Gore Vidal

Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year. — Daniel Kahneman

I'd known cruelty in a school - cruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene - crowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak - happened to be my personal trigger. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Callaway sells golf clubs and Nike sells running shoes. But running is unique in that the world's best racers are on the same course, at the same time, as amateurs, who have as much chance of winning as your average weekend warrior would scoring a touchdown in the NFL. — Hunter S. Thompson

Being human and investigating the affairs of the gods is an extreme version of being tone-deaf and talking about music, or having never served in the army and talking about warfare: we resemble amateurs trying to use arguments from probability based on opinions and conjecture to unearth the ideas of experts. Given — Plutarch

Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to. — Alice Weaver Flaherty

Life is so urgent and necessitates living slow. It's only the amateurs-and that I've been, and it's been ugly-who thinks slow and urgent are contradictory. — Ann Voskamp

On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something. Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing. — Austin Kleon

There's a myth among amateurs, optimists and fools that beyond a certain level of achievement, famous artists retire to some kind of Elysium where criticism no longer wounds and work materializes without their effort. — Mark Matousek

My father had seen in a flash that they were all gunmen, so he told me to stand still, although we were right in a possible line of fire. If near a gun-fight and the weapons are wielded by amateurs, run for your life; if professionals are handling the trigger, stand still - they know where they are shooting. — William S. Hart

Most nervous I've ever been is probably the 2007 Walker Cup. I was a little boy playing with these 8 or 9 other guys that were the best amateurs in the country. — Rickie Fowler

[O]pen platforms and experimental amateurs ... eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros ... Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether. — Cory Doctorow

You are trying to lure us into revealing information you're not entitled to? With chocolate and wine? Are you amateurs? — Moira J. Moore

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets. — Louis Menand

Hell is full of musical amateurs. — George Bernard Shaw

History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it's what you write, not what your credentials are. — George Dyson

There were a lot of gifted amateurs in my day. Most of the kids now play fantastically well. I think there are so many bands around now who might get there, but it's a tougher journey. — Nick Mason

Universities are institutions run by amateurs to train professionals. — Derek Bok

For we are all amateurs at life, but if we do not focus too much on our mistakes, a miraculous picture emerges. And we learn that it's not the beauty of the image that warrants our gratitude
it's the chance to paint. — Richard Paul Evans

I do uphill skiing; I don't do downhill skiing. I think that's for nerd amateurs. — Judah Friedlander

There are no amateurs in the world of children. — Don DeLillo

I am very pleased to be involved with the Daniel Pearl Music Days committee because its message resonates with me on a very personal level, My own career is an example of the universal power of music, especially the power of Hip Hop, to bring people of different backgrounds together for a common purpose. I hope that my commitment to the Daniel Pearl Music Days committee will encourage all music lovers - both amateurs and professionals - to get involved with the Music Days performance network and contribute to the 'Harmony For Humanity' e-Stage. — Russell Simmons

We attracted a lot of market timers and asset allocators. I don't need those ... amateurs in my fund. — Martin J. Whitman

What followed for two hours was such an adventure as only wretched amateurs would indulge in... — Hilaire Belloc

War is always a professional enterprise; despair is left to amateurs. — Hans Koning

Oh, my poor, sweet cousin from Oklahoma," Tonya said, shaking her head. "You, my dear, are in big trouble." "I am?" Kylie asked, turning to her friend, wearing her panic all over her face. "You're in love. And as I've said before, this shit ain't for amateurs. — Caisey Quinn

Relationships is not a game of amateurs is what people say..
But they begin to foster between amateurs and become a reason to make them matured grown-ups! — Sujit Lalwani

Are we amateurs and not professionals? We know the lessons of history, we know the mistakes and we either act accordingly or collapse. Salvation lies in clarity and the courage to implement change — Thomas S. Power

What does a professional photojournalist do that others cannot? Depicting photo opportunities as if they are authentic, covering press conferences, or making subjects play their assigned roles (the poor as passive victims, celebrities as glamorous) are hardly adequate responses. In fact, these might be reasons to ask for the help of amateurs who do not know how to stylize their imagery and are not interested in making a publication seem more palatable to its potential consumers. — Fred Ritchin

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs — Francois Truffaut

At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction) — Michel Parry

I think most amateurs dread playing a 180-plus-yard par 3 even more than a hard par 4. Part of it is psychological: You think you should be getting a breather, distance-wise, and instead, you get hit with a long iron or hybrid shot over trouble. — Ernie Els

And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the lazy, the insensitive, or the imitative. It is for the creative, and creativity implies both talent and hard work. — Wallace Stegner

More clumsily,he put his arm around her and tried to hug. They were definitely amateurs at showing affection. — Caroline B. Cooney

As an amateur you have an advantage over photographers - you can do as you wish ... This should make amateurs the happiest of photographers. — Andreas Feininger

Amateurs want to be right. Professionals want to make money. — Alan Greenspan

It's so easy for some people to get naked. They think they're so promiscuous and avant-garde and rebellious ... but year-round their souls are covered in winter clothing! My soul is promiscuous, now how's that for being a rebel without a cause? They are amateurs. — C. JoyBell C.

As an individual navigating this reality, you have to make choices to survive. Sometimes you happily work for free if it's something you love and believe in. I'm not categorically saying that working for free is bad. I'm just looking at the broader implications of it, and also challenge this idea - and again, this is an argument made by certain people in the tech world - that amateurs are automatically more pure and will triumph over stodgy professionals. — Astra Taylor

Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to "watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives." Amateurs fit the same bill: They're just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it. — Austin Kleon

As long as you are hanging around amateurs, you will think like an amateur, and you will not improve your skills. — John C. Maxwell