Top 42 Dilettante Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased.
Vernor Vinge
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.
Edith Wharton
#15. I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy - but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter.
Antoni Tapies
#16. I don't mind the word 'dilettante.' A dilettante means someone who does what he loves.
Peter Beard
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.
Odilon Redon
#20. What is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd? ...
John Geddes
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.
Thomas F. Wilson
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.
Aleksandar Hemon
#32. 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
#33. I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'
Ian Hacking
#35. I want to make sure I'm not a dilettante. Decorating has been a passion all my life. I love it.
Cristina Saralegui
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I heard no longer The snowy-banded, dilettante, Delicate-handed priest intone.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#42. No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth ...
Isaac Asimov
