Sample sentences for DILETTANTE

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Definition

someone with an interest in an area, but without the knowledge or experience of a professional

In the past, dilettante was also used to reference a person interested in the arts.

As a young woman, she was a dilettante whose aspirations were hampered by her lack of self-discipline.

dilettante = someone with an interest in an area, but without deep understanding

I love painting, but I fear my efforts are dilettantish.

dilettantish = of a person with an interest in an area, but without real expertise

(Editor's note: Adding the suffix "-ish" means having the characteristics of. This is the same pattern you see in words like childish and foolish.)

She's a self-important dilettante without real understanding of the policies she criticizes.

dilettante = someone with an interest in an area, but without deep understanding

What is to me a means of livelihood is to him the merest hobby of a dilettante.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan -- Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
I really have no mind to turn into a dilettante spiritualist.
Conrad, Joseph -- Under Western Eyes
It's better up here away from the phonies and the dilettantes.
Daniel Keyes -- Flowers for Algernon — Novel

dilettantes = people with an interest in an area, but without the knowledge or experience of a professional

You're sneering at the phonies and dilettantes, aren't you?
Daniel Keyes -- Flowers for Algernon — Novel

dilettantes = people with an interest in an area, but without the knowledge or experience of a professional

She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for the interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante lover.
Sinclair Lewis -- Arrowsmith
To give that number is the custom here: 'twas by a Dilettante written, And Dilettanti in the parts appear.
Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) -- Faust
He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be artistic.
Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables
I had no bent, I was a dilettante—and I realized it when I saw that my tutors were bored with me.
Robert A. Heinlein -- Glory Road
*" Then Leon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music.
Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary
You were not meant to be measured in that way—you were meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante!
Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2
A dilettantism[496] in nature is barren and unworthy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays
"I thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted.
Sinclair Lewis -- Main Street
The cottage was far from that standard at present, for Lisbeth's rheumatism had forced her to give up her old habits of dilettante scouring and polishing.
George Eliot -- Adam Bede
Atkinson's a rich dilettante; he does what he's told, but he doesn't know why or by whom.
Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Ultimatum
Nevertheless several accomplished alpinists not on her team regarded Pittman as a grandstanding dilettante.
Jon Krakauer -- Into Thin Air
David was no dilettante; he played the center of the court.
Stephen King -- The Gunslinger
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful.
W. E. B. Du Bois -- The Souls of Black Folk

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