90 Dilettante Quotes

Following is our list of dilettante quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about different way of thinking.

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Famous Dilettante Quotes

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'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

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

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study. - George Bernard Shaw

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study. — George Bernard Shaw

Every artist was first an amateur. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist was first an amateur. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To busy oneself with what is futile when one can do something useful, to attend to what is simple when one has the mettle to attempt what is difficult, is to strip talent of its dignity. — Jose Marti

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity. — John Barth

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything — Clifford Geertz

Even the most accomplished of experts start out as unserious beginners. — Angela Duckworth

How various his employments whom the world Calls idle; and who justly in return Esteems that busy world an idler too! — William Cowper

One who does not rouse themself when it is time to rise, who, though capable, is full of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle person will never find their way to true knowledge. — Buddha

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words. — Samuel Johnson

A half-hearted spirit has no power. Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Average people enter into their endeavors headlong and without care. — Epictetus

Being pretty good at everything is more important than excelling in one pursuit. Be an athlete of life. — Peter Attia

I'm an artist, a designer, a craftsman, interior designer, half-architect. There's no one name that fits me very well. — Dale Chihuly

Short Dilettante Quotes

  • The Bauhaus fights imitation, inferior craftsmanship and artistic dilettantism — Walter Gropius
  • Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist — George V
  • The cat is a dilettante in fur. — Theophile Gautier
  • Above all else I am a dilettante in life. — Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
  • Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. — Anna Julia Cooper
  • In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante. — Edith Wharton
  • I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts. — Thomas F. Wilson
  • Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist. — George V. Higgins
  • I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts. — Thomas Wilson
  • I am a human guinea pig and a professional dilettante. — Tim Ferriss

Dilettante Image Quotes

What Am I Thinking Quotes

My philosophy is: It's none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier. — Anthony Hopkins

For I am not so enamoured of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them. — Nicolaus Copernicus

Some mornings you wake up and think, gee I look handsome today. Other days I think, what am I doing in the movies? I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift. — Liam Neeson

I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind. — John Diefenbaker

I write to find out what I am thinking. I write to find out who I am. I write to understand things. — Julia Alvarez

I am a very positive thinker, and I think that is what helps me the most in difficult moments. — Roger Federer

Don't think your dreams don't come true, because they do. You'd better be careful what you wish for. And I truly and honestly - one day I am doing the 'Beaver' show and I said, 'This is the show I have always wanted to do.' — Barbara Billingsley

I think a good MP is someone who cares for their community and becomes their champion, which is why I will make my home in any seat I am lucky enough to be selected for. Looks play no part in the equation, what matters is your ideas and connecting them to the electorate. — Adam Rickitt

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not. — Aleksandar Hemon

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you. — Milan Kundera

Different Way Of Thinking Quotes

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. — Benjamin Franklin

I actually think that the most efficacious way of making a difference is to lead by example, and doing random acts of kindness is setting a very good example of how to behave in the world. — Misha Collins

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. — Gregory Bateson

What we experience is our own concept of things. That is why no two people see quite the same world, and why, in many cases, different people see such different worlds. To put it another way, we make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts. — Emmet Fox

Thinking gets you nowhere. It may be a fine and noble aid in academic studies, but you can't think your way out of emotional difficulties. That takes something altogether different. You have to make yourself passive then, and just listen. Re-establish contact with a slice of eternity. — Etty Hillesum

The Minority Mindset has nothing to do with the way you look. It's the mindset of thinking differently than the majority of people. — Jaspreet Singh

I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learned to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything. — Saul Leiter

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. — Steve Jobs

With the show itself, we try to think of new and different ways to make each other laugh, while enjoying what we're doing. — Joe Gatto

In law school they teach a very different way of thinking, in that you need to take both the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s sides of the issue, both sides of the issue, and run down the arguments as if each one of them is true. — Nick Szabo

People Writing About Dilettante

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Brian Eno

Brian Eno
quotes on music, life and brain

211 820
Read quotes by Tom Hodgkinson

Tom Hodgkinson
quotes on leadership, education and culture

47 217
Read quotes by George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw
quotes on happiness, life and communication

1399 16489
Read quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson
quotes on love and marriage, nature and self reliance

4234 36527
Read quotes by Jose Marti

Jose Marti
quotes on education

107 1653
Read quotes by John Barth

John Barth
quotes on leadership, education and life

40 244

More Dilettante Quotes

Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you're looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you're still an idiot. — Joel Greenblatt

And it's a - it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll. — Iggy Pop

I have spent some months in England, have seen an awful lot and learned little. England is not a land of science, there is only a widely practised dilettantism, the chemists are ashamed to call themselves chemists because the pharmacists, who are despised, have assumed this name. — Justus von Liebig

Punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it. — Iggy Pop

PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART. Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals. — George Maciunas

The so-called materialistic conception of history, with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the Communist Manifesto, still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes. — Max Weber

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

And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum. — Nic Pizzolatto

Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainlander, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize). — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

Of course, [Adolf] Hitler was a dilettante, but he was a completely amoral person. Yes, he had no morals at all. — Manfred Rommel

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

Our hypothetical rich client might even have ordered a Pommard, because it was listed at a higher price...He would have never learned [about other wines]. A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. — A. J. Liebling

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

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

Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go. — Thomas Carlyle

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

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. — Henry David Thoreau

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

Mildly talented in a variety of ways but with no genuine ability in any one field, she was like me, the perennial hapless self-amused dilettante, half-worried by the slippage of time but determined to enjoy failure anyway. — Edward Abbey

War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect. We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of the sheltered life. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the specters of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword. — Sir Edmund Gosse

I'm bored with DJs. Anybody that puts the title DJ in front of their name immediately turns me off. I prefer the term "sampling," because it has both the dilettante side, like someone tasting wine or caviar, but also functions as a kind of litmus paper dipped into culture. And the whole semi-legality of sampling is very interesting as well. So a DJ is not really creative enough for me to be an appropriate metaphor. — Momus

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

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

A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

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

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

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