United States or Algeria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


He imagined himself Parisian to the tips of his fingers. But far from being that he was in danger of remaining a sort of nondescript dilettante all his life. He had pushed the habit of universal raillery to a point where it blinded him to the genuine impulses of his own nature.

For I am no false modesty, Friend Severin; you can lie to others, but you don't quite succeed any longer in lying to yourself I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at present secure for their masters the income of a cabinet minister, or even that of a minor potentate.

There were one or two great rooms, a multitude of family portraits, and landscapes, marbles and coins brought from Italy by a traveled and dilettante ancestor. It was a great rendezvous for numerous Buller relations.

The private man, indifferent to politics, and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a dilettante, seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be required on such a point.

I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius would allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not happy. Such considerations must appear to these pedants to be characterized by a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante superficiality.

He is only splurging round to start up the greenies." And the mud-clerk spoke with an indifference and yet a sort of dilettante interest in the game that shocked his friend, the striker. "Why don't they set these blacklegs ashore?" said August, whose love of justice was strong. "You tell," drawled the mud-clerk. He can set them off whenever he wants to."

He belongs to every individual soul whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and sufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle of his tyrannical spell. When, in that dark Toledo Church, one presses one's face against the iron bars that separate one from the Burial of Count Orguz, it is neither as a Dilettante nor an Idealist that one holds one's breath.

A tramp is one who has fallen a victim of arrested development and never emerged from the nomadic stage; an artistic dilettante is one who has jumped the round where boys dig in the dirt and has evolved into a missnancy. Young Carl Linnæus skipped no round in his evolution. He began as a savage, robbing birds' nests, chasing butterflies, capturing bees, bugs and beetles.

The air, at a certain social elevation, is as full as it has ever been of ideas, theories, problems, possible solutions, suggested questions, and proffered answers. But then they are at large, without cohesion, and very apt to be the objects even in the more instructed minds of not much more than dilettante interest.

With a couple of leaps I am within the house and catch my breath and reflect. What am I really, a little dilettante or a great big donkey? A sultry morning, the atmosphere is dead, heavily laden with odors, yet stimulating. Again I am sitting in my honey-suckle arbor, reading in the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into beasts. A wonderful picture of antique love.