Dilettante Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

The Work of Art. When I watch the audience at a concert or the crowd in the picture gallery I ask myself sometimes what exactly is their reaction towards the work of art. It is plain that often they feel deeply, but I do not see that their feeling has any effect, and if it has no effect its value is slender. Art to them is only a recreation or a refuge. It rests them from the work which they consider the justification of their existence or consoles them in their disappointment with reality. It is the glass of beer which the labourer drinks when he pauses in his toil or the peg of gin which the harlot takes to snatch a moment's oblivion from the pain of life. Art for art's sake means no more than gin for gin's sake. The dilettante who cherishes the sterile emotions which he receives from the contemplation of works of art has little reason to rate himself higher than the toper. His is the attitude of the pessimist. Life is a struggle or a weariness and in art he seeks repose or forgetfulness. The pessimist refuses reality, but the artist accepts it. The emotion caused by a work of art has value only if it has an effect on character and so results in action. Whoever is so affected is himself an artist. The artist's response to the work of art is direct and reasonable, for in him the emotion is translated into ideas which are pertinent to his own purposes, and to him ideas are but another form of action. But I do not mean that it is only painters, poets and musicians who can resp ~ W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only death can cure the hip dilettante. ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

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

The cat is a dilettante in fur. ~ Theophile Gautier

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

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

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

Advancement begins within the man himself; when he advances from half-interest to strength of purpose; when he advances from hesitancy to decisive directness; when he advances from immaturity to maturity of judgment; when he advances from apprenticeship to mastery; when he advances from a mere dilettante at labour to a worker who finds a genuine joy in work; when he advances from an eye-server to one who can be entrusted to do his work without oversight and without prodding - why, then the world advances! ~ Henry Ford

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. My governing word is 'curiosity.' ~ Ian Hacking

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

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

Suddenly, he wanted some credit for it. He wanted someone to thank him for not crapping on the institution of love. He wanted someone to thank him for not being yet another dilettante. He wanted someone to thank him for quitting poetry. He wanted some great poet to thank him for quitting poetry instead of desecrating it with his amateurishness. He wanted some unborn child to thank him for not conceiving her and not leaving her a hope chest full of mawkish villanelles. He wanted some sort of organization of martyrs to give him an award. He wanted to be decorated for not putting up a fuss. He wanted to be the president of forgettable people. He wanted there to be a competition for the least competitive person, and he wanted to win that competition. He wanted some sort of badge or outfit or medal or key or hat. He wanted to be asked to stand. He wanted to be considered. He wanted to be considered in earnest before being ignored. He wanted all the insane and beautiful and passionate people in the world to take one moment of silence in gratitude for the ones who had ceded them the stage-- he, the unread poet, the sacrifice, the schoolteacher-- he wanted one goddamned moment of appreciation. ~ Amity Gaige

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

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

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

...but Marcel in the novel does not merely remember what happened to him when he was younger and lived the life of a dilettante, in most cases he invents, he speculates, imagines makes up stories about himself and the other characters in the novel. Yes, Marcel constantly invents, right before our eyes, what he thinks happened, or might have happened, or ought to have happened, especially since, in many instances, he was not present himself to witness what happened, or if he was present he was unable to hear or see what was happening. That is, in fact, the key to this novel: that Marcel does not simply remember what he tells us, but that he speculates on the basis of what he thinks he remembers. Therefore, it is not memory but imagination that engenders the novel. A la recherche du temps perdu is not simply a work of fiction that looks backward to retrieve the past, it is above all a novel that looks forward towards its own future, towards its own making, as it reflects on its creative process. And that is also true of much contemporary fiction, or what has been called New Fiction, Metafiction, Anti-fiction, Postmodern Fiction, or Surfiction. ~ Raymond Federman

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

The fury of confession, at first,
then the fury of clarity:
It was from you, Death, that such hypocritical
obscure feeling was born! And now
let them accuse me of every passion,
let them bad-mouth me, let them say I'm deformed,
impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer.
You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life,
I'm on the stake. I play the card of fire
and I win this little, immense goodness of mine.
I can do it, for I have suffered you too much!

I return to you as an émigré returns
to his own country and rediscovers it:
I made a fortune (in the intellect)
and I'm happy, as I once was,
destitute of any norm,
a black rage of poetry in my breast.
A crazy old-age youth.
Once your joy was confused with terror,
it's true, and now almost with other joy,
livid and arid, my passion deluded.
Now you really frighten me,
for you are truly close to me,
part of my angry state, of obscure hunger,
of the anxiety almost of a new being. ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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