Dillettanti Quotes & Sayings

The second volume of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka ... [is] a tangle of counter-grained and often under-sourced life stories, but reading Stach's magnificent narrative (wonderfully translated by Shelley Frisch) straight through brings death, not life, to the forefront. Stach is a compulsively readable writer ... [A]s in the previous volume, the prose in The Years of Insight is supple and very appealingly complex
all of which, once again, is perfectly rendered by Frisch. — Steve Donoghue

Five years is a good run for a sitcom; seven is good, but usually, it's a couple years of staying past your welcome. — Mike Scully

Sucess is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it ... Err in the direction of kindness. — George Saunders

But Ma, I have the power to save her!"
-TIM — Huntley Fitzpatrick

Experience may teach us what is, but never that it cannot be otherwise. — Immanuel Kant

Human hair takes much more attention, as far as holding the style. You have to comb it, straighten it out, and wash and dry it. — Beverly Johnson

I'm starting to think about my life, thinking about where I'm going to be in three years time: who I'm going to be with, where I'm going to be situated myself. — Tinie Tempah

It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach. — Orson Scott Card

This is the greatest mystery of the human mind
the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain. — John Steinbeck

We're bankrupting our country and we have an empire that we're trying to defend which costs us $1 trillion a year. And the standard of living is going down today. It's going down and the middle class is hurting because of the monetary policy. When you destroy a currency, the middle class gets wiped out. — Ron Paul

As our friend Zach has often noted, in our days those who do the best for astronomy are not the salaried university professors, but so-called dillettanti, physicians, jurists, and so forth.Lamenting the fragmentary time left to a professor has remaining after fulfilling his teaching duties. — Carl Friedrich Gauss