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dilettante
in a sentence

show 40 more with this conextual meaning
  • I had no bent, I was a dilettante—and I realized it when I saw that my tutors were bored with me.†   (source)
  • In a dozen years sudden death culled the city of dilettantes until only the Shrike and I remained.   (source)
    dilettantes = people with an interest in a subject, but without deep understanding
  • "Dilettantes," Art3mis said.†   (source)
  • He was saying to a somber young female who wore glasses and a low-cut evening gown: "My dear, you will never be more than a dilettante of the intellect, unless you submerge yourself in some cause greater than yourself."†   (source)
  • …feeling except at the cost of many days' enslavement to the daily round; and, then, the ardent longing for the realm of the spirit in eternal and deadly war with the equally ardent and holy love of the lost innocence of nature, the whole frightful suspense in vacancy and uncertainty, this condemnation to the transient that can never be valid, that is ever experimental and dilettantish; in short, the utter lack of purpose to which the human state is condemned—to its consuming despair.†   (source)
  • …or to the mask of him that was already falling away, clung to his coquetting with the spiritual, to his bourgeois horror of the disorderly and accidental (to which death, too, belonged) and compared the new Harry—the somewhat timid and ludicrous dilettante of the dance rooms—scornfully and enviously with the old one in whose ideal and lying portrait he had since discovered all those fatal characteristics which had upset him that night so grievously in the professor's print of Goethe.†   (source)
  • "I thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted.†   (source)
  • *" Then Leon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music.†   (source)
  • Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish.†   (source)
  • He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be artistic.†   (source)
  • He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.†   (source)
  • Out he came, not noticing Fearenside's dog, who was sniffing in a dilettante spirit at Hall's legs.†   (source)
  • She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for the interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante lover.†   (source)
  • It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner.†   (source)
  • If for his part our good engineer has already voiced analogous opinions, that only confirms my surmise that, like so many talented young men, he is playing the intellectual dilettante, temporarily experimenting with possible points of view.†   (source)
  • He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship to be his strength and pride.†   (source)
  • There were also other themes: Alpine dairy sheds, dewlapped cows standing or lying in sun-drenched pastures, a plucked hen among vegetables with its twisted neck dangling over one side of a table, floral arrangements, local mountain folk, and so on—all of them painted in a kind of brisk, dilettante style, with brash clumps of color that often looked as if they had been squeezed onto the canvas directly from the tube and must have taken a long time to dry.†   (source)
  • And this delight in being a lover, in living by love alone, of the reality of which he was inclined to be doubtful, the price which, in the long run, he must pay for it, as a dilettante in immaterial sensations, enhanced its value in his eyes—as one sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable, become convinced that they are, as also of the rare quality and absolute detachment of their own taste, when they have agreed to pay…†   (source)
  • Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful.†   (source)
  • It made one idle and dilettantish and second-rate; it had no discipline for the character, didn't cultivate in you, otherwise expressed, the successful social and other "cheek" that flourished in Paris and London.†   (source)
  • To give that number is the custom here: 'twas by a Dilettante written, And Dilettanti in the parts appear.†   (source)
  • All this admitted, Newman enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, as profoundly as the most zealous dilettante.†   (source)
  • 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.†   (source)
  • 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!†   (source)
  • Mrs. Touchett easily remembered that the girl had refused an English peer; and that a young lady with whom Lord Warburton had not successfully wrestled should content herself with an obscure American dilettante, a middle-aged widower with an uncanny child and an ambiguous income, this answered to nothing in Mrs. Touchett's conception of success.†   (source)
  • As Dilettante I the curtain raise.†   (source)
  • A dilettantism[496] in nature is barren and unworthy.†   (source)
  • All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.†   (source)
  • "You wouldn't have her live, like you, among a lot of broken-down chairs and threadbare carpets!" she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.'†   (source)
  • Broad-browed and strong-chinned, with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry's, Burne was a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and security—stubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in it no quality of dilettantism.†   (source)
  • His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.†   (source)
  • It's better up here away from the phonies and the dilettantes.   (source)
    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?   (source)
  • I made a remark of this kind to Rutherford, and he replied: "Yes, that's true, and we have a special word of disparagement for them--we call them dilettanti.†   (source)
    unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans would spell it dilettantes.
  • The story of the day was rehearsed, with all kinds of ornament and varnishing which might be necessary to heighten its effect; for Sam, like some of our fashionable dilettanti, never allowed a story to lose any of its gilding by passing through his hands.†   (source)
  • European Liberals in general, and even our liberal dilettanti, often mix up the final results of socialism with those of Christianity.†   (source)
  • He knew that Vronsky could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew that he and all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was distasteful to him.†   (source)
  • But it's not only Liberals and dilettanti who mix up socialism and Christianity, but, in many cases, it appears, the police—the foreign police, of course—do the same.†   (source)
  • He was well acquainted with the way dilettanti have (the cleverer they were the worse he found them) of looking at the works of contemporary artists with the sole object of being in a position to say that art is a thing of the past, and that the more one sees of the new men the more one sees how inimitable the works of the great old masters have remained.†   (source)
  • To give that number is the custom here: 'twas by a Dilettante written, And Dilettanti in the parts appear.†   (source)
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