Dilettante Quotes & Sayings

Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased. — Vernor Vinge

The beautiful dream of young love that ventures only on half-measures, that desires and dares not ask, promises and does not give.

He was homeless in the noble sense of those who, like the Vikings and pirates of beauty, have collected in their intellectual raids all that is most precious in many great cities. He was close to all the arts in the manner of a dilettante, but stronger than his love for them was his sublime disdain to serve them.

Destiny does not always need the powerful prelude of a sudden violent blow to shake a heart beyond recovery.

Memory is always a bond and every loving memory is a bond twice over. — Stefan Zweig

Live the lifestyle instead of paying lip service to the lifesytle. Live with commitment. With emotional content. Live whatever life you choose honestly. Give up this renaissance man, dilettante bullshit of doing a lot of different things (and none of them very well by real standards). Get to the guts of one thing; accept, without casuistry, the responsability of making a choice. — Mark Twight

No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth ... — Isaac Asimov

Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. — Anna Julia Cooper

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art. — Odilon Redon

I'm just this committed dilettante. I think what I've found is that I've tried to do a lot of different things in my life and discovered I'm not as good at them as I'd want to be. — Graham Moore

Why did you spend your whole life working in an insurance company? You should have been a painter, a musician, well, I don't know. Why didn't you follow your calling?"

Don Rigoberto nodded and reflected a moment before answering.

"Because I was a coward, son," he finally murmured. "Because I lacked faith in myself. I never believed I had the talent to be a real artist. But maybe that was an excuse for not trying. I decided not to be a creator but only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. Because I was a coward is the sad truth. So now you know. Don't follow my example. Whatever your calling is, follow it as far as you can and don't do what I did, don't betray it. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

People were a little leery when I was doing the press for my last album 'Rumble Doll,' yes. It's always that thing that this is a dilettante or a pet project. — Patti Scialfa

Too often in the past, we have thought of the artist as an idler and dilettante and of the lover of arts as somehow sissy and effete. We have done both an injustice. The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has labored hard, often amid deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening. His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline. — John F. Kennedy

I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much. — John Darnielle

arts, I said, just like that in painting, in literature, I said, even philosophers are ignorant of philosophy. Most artists are ignorant of their art. They have a dilettante's notion of art, remain stuck all their lives in dilettantism, even the most famous artists in the world. We — Thomas Bernhard

I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.' — Ian Hacking

I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy - but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter. — Antoni Tapies

I'm fascinated by people who have to reinvent themselves. I did it a few times - I was going to be a physicist before I was passionate about philosophy - and I realized that one more change, and I'm going to start looking like a dilettante. — Lenny Abrahamson

The dilemma is this. In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for years. If he tries to be the Rounded Universal Man, like Leonardo da Vinci, or to take all knowledge for his province, like Francis Bacon, he is most likely to become a mere dilettante and dabbler. But if he becomes too specialized, he is apt to become narrow and lopsided, ignorant on every subject but his own, and perhaps dull and sterile even on that because he lacks perspective and vision and has missed the cross-fertilization of ideas that can come from knowing something of other subjects. — Henry Hazlitt

Do you know what it is to play a part? To split your personality deliberately for twenty-four hours a day? Even when with friends? Even when alone, so that you will never forget inadvertently? To be a dilettante? To be eternally amused? To be of no account? To be so effete and faintly ridiculous that you have convinced all who know you of your own worthlessness? All so that your life may be safe even though it means it has become barely worth living. But even so, once in a while I can fight them. — Isaac Asimov

I'm no part time dilettante photographer, unlike the bartenders, shoe salesmen, floorwalkers plumbers, barbers, grocery clerks and chiropractors whose great hobby is their camera. All their friends rave about what wonderful pictures they take. If they're so good, why don't they take pictures full - time, for a living, and make floor walking, chiropractics, etc., their hobby? But everyone wants to play it safe. They're afraid to give up their pay checks and their security they might miss a meal. — Weegee

I have a very, very secret drive to become a dilettante, without the pejorative overtones or the obligation to produce myself. There's so much to examine, so much to contemplate. I have enormous enthusiasm when I start a new project but then there's the meetings and the counter-meetings, the rehearsals, the struggles. You have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get your dreams realised. — Peter Greenaway

In some ways, I feel like I've been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking up instruments and stretching myself so thin. — Zach Condon

I have had a hard time settling on one medium and feel like a dilettante at times, taking up one medium and then wanting to learn to work in another. At age 76, I really don't have the time to settle down to one medium when there are so many avenues to explore. — Nancy Johnson

As for work, without it, without painstaking work, any writer or artist definitely remains a dilettante; there's no point in waiting for so-called blissful moments, for inspiration; if it comes, so much the better
but you keep working anyway. — Ivan Turgenev

Such elderly people were in the habit of saying that he simply had no will-power; but it might just as well have been said that he had all his life long only been a many-sided dilettante. — Robert Musil

It's a wonderful profession, and it opens lots of doors, and I think it's quite right that people can accuse actors and actresses of being dilettante, but you learn on every job, whatever it is, the process moves you on in some way, and yeah, I want to expand my knowledge of our existence, I suppose. — Miranda Richardson

The newspaper got it all wrong. They should have called me a harlot and a slut, a poseur and a tease, a nubile and naive,
a slattern and a sleaze, a vandalist and anarchist, a dirty dilettante with a fatal and fervent disease.
Because I was all of those things in the twelve days when there was too much rain and I was burning and I found and lost Justine. — Rebecca Godfrey

I don't mind the word 'dilettante.' A dilettante means someone who does what he loves. — Peter Beard

Can that which has cost the artist days, weeks, months and even years of reflection be understood in a flash by a dilettante? — Robert Schumann

Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist. — George V. Higgins

And then, when it was pointed out that the only way to pay for the idea would be for the government to take 10 percent or reinstitute taxes, the reaction turned violent. And so, many an earnest and rich dilettante got the crap kicked out of him while failing to understand why the people he was trying to help the most tended to be the very ones who most wanted to kick the crap out of him. — Dani Kollin

I went to see Chicago after I finished shooting, and say what you want about it, but that thing was so meticulously planned. It was planned like NASA planned its trips to the moon. It made me feel like some sort of horrible dilettante. — Guy Maddin

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous. — Northrop Frye

I'm curious about everyone, hungry for everything, greedy for all ideas. My awareness that not everything can be seen, not everything read and not everything thought torments me like the loss of ..... But I don't see with fixed attention, I don't read with great care, and I don't think with continuity. I'm an ardent and inconsequential dilettante in everything. My soul is too weak to sustain the force of its own enthusiasm. Made out of ruins of the unfinished, I'm definable as a landscape of resignations. — Fernando Pessoa

In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives. — Ben Affleck

Only death can cure the hip dilettante. — Gilbert Sorrentino

This study is not for the amateur. It's not for the dilettante. It's not for the cult follower. It's not for someone who wants everything done for them. It's not for the one who just wants to stare with that fixed dog-like devotion towards the teacher. — Frederick Lenz

I never thought, "I'm going to be an artist". When I actually began to become successful in the art world I made it a point to say, 'I am a dilettante, I am not a professional artist", which is true. — Yoko Ono

I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation. — Aleksandar Hemon

I can't do the movies like I do painting because I am really more of a sort of dilettante or something. I mean I know guys that make movies that I can see it is absolutely their medium and they can just go from one movie right into the next because it is just - they have got it so much on the tips of their fingers. But for me it is a special effort. — Red Grooms

One cannot enter don Juan's world intellectually, like a dilettante seeking fast and fleeting knowledge. Nor, in don Juan's world, can anything be verified absolutely. The only thing we can do is arrive at a state of increased awareness that allows us to perceive the world around us in a more inclusive manner. — Carlos Castaneda

I want to make sure I'm not a dilettante. Decorating has been a passion all my life. I love it. — Cristina Saralegui

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante. — Edith Wharton

First the mania for confession,
then the mania for clarity,
issued from you, dark, hypocritical
sentiment! Let them now
condemn my every passion, let them
drag me through the mud, call me twisted,
foul pervert, dilettante, perjurer;
you keep me apart, give me life's assurance:
I burn at the stake, play the card of fire
and win: I win this small,
vast possession, my infinite,
miserable pity
which makes even righteous anger my friend.
And I can do this because I've endured you too long! — Pier Paolo Pasolini

I heard no longer The snowy-banded, dilettante, Delicate-handed priest intone. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts. — Thomas F. Wilson

It is such an agreeable feeling to be busy with something one is only half-competent to do that nobody should criticize the dilettante for taking up an art he will never learn, or blame the artist who leaves the territory of his own art for the pleasure of trying himself in a neighbouring one. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

This dilettante notion that the global economy is evil because big corporate leaders make too much money ... they do make too much money, but the only way we've figured out how to generate wealth in this world is through the market economy. — Joe Klein

In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything. — Tom Hodgkinson

Fishing from a boat seems like dilettante bullshit - like hunting wild boar with a can of spray paint from the safety of a pick-up truck — Hunter S. Thompson

For better or worse, I've always been curious musically. Whether it's opera or Judy Garland or pop, I've deliberately sought those things out. I've never wanted to do the same things over and over. Some think I've accomplished what I set out to do, and others consider me a dilettante. — Rufus Wainwright

There is a place for everyone, man and woman, old and young, hale and halt; service in a thousand forms is open. There is no room now for the dilettante, the weakling, for the shirker, or the sluggard. From the highest to the humblest tasks, all are of equal honor; all have their part to play. — Winston Churchill

Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I'm just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style. — Michael Dirda

It would appear to a quoting dilettante - i.e., one of those writers and scholars who fill up their texts with phrases from some dead authority - that, as phrased by Hobbes, "from like antecedents flow like consequents." Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship's captain:
"But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident ... of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort." E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS
Titanic Captain Smith's ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research. — Brian Eno

I always did healthy things. I didn't sit around in nightclubs. Sure, I had my fair share of fun, but no one could ever accuse me of being a dilettante and doing nothing. I was always on this unbelievable quest to go and do. — Marie-Chantal Claire

And dilettantism is a humorous way to survive. Everybody understands you for it and everybody hates you for it. And not everybody chooses to be a dilettante. Many choose cunning and brute force. — Francesco Clemente

What is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd? ... — John Geddes

I've worked in so many areas
I'm sort of a dilettante. Basically, I'm not interested in doing research and I never have been. — David Blackwell

I am nothing but a dilettante,
a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the
so-called unprofitable arts.
Above all else I am a dilettante in life
Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry.
I never
got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza.
There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything.
I am
such a one. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The cat is a dilettante in fur. — Theophile Gautier

I am regarded as a usurper, as an imposter and dilettante, because I do technically come from the wrong side of the tracks in musical terms. — Rufus Wainwright