"Dabbler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pointed occasions are most useful and inspiring. As those who speak French imperfectly are glad to dwell on any topic they may have talked upon or heard others talk upon before, because they know appropriate words for it in French, so the dabbler in verse rejoices to behold a waterfall, because he has learned the sentiment and knows appropriate words for it in poetry. But the dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with any subject; and whether it was a stormy night, a shepherd's collie, a sheep struggling in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trifling details; and, doubtless, it will be early enough to announce the capital when they have playfully pounced upon the deposits. But there is some candour in TWENTY-NINE provisional committees, and their accumulated nominal capital proves to be—how much, think you, gifted reader, and confident dabbler in new stock? Why, merely this—TWENTY-FIVE MILLIONS EIGHT HUNDRED AND THIRTY THOUSAND POUNDS!!! Now—for we wish always to speak and write within the mark—let us calculate the eleven Harpocrates Companies and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... on the pretty red and white of the boyish dabbler in Art—for Lyle had lately taken a fancy that way too—and then at the countenance he maligned. She did not say a word; but Lyle hovering round, found his interference somewhat sharply put aside during ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... possibilities of music as a substitute for drugs. I am surprised that Doctor Capsule has neither heard nor thought about it, for I should think it would prove to be a pleasant and profitable field for speculation. Even I who am only a dabbler in medicine, and know no more about it than the effects of certain remedies upon my own symptoms, have noticed that music of a certain sort is a sure ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... historians as 'a little piece of wood, to which a string was fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round to make a roaring noise.' The performers in the 'mysteries' at which this implement was used daubed themselves all over with clay. Demosthenes describes the mother of Aeschines as a dabbler in mysteries, and tells how Aeschines used to assist her by helping to bedaub the initiate with clay and bran. Various explanations have been offered of these practices, but let us see how they tally with any prevailing customs. First, the bull-roarer is to be found in almost ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... illustration, his mind ever turned first to the law; he seems almost to have thought in legal phrases; the commonest legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen." That could happen to no one but a person whose trade was the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it. Veteran mariners fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their similes from the ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere passenger ever does it, be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could do ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... groundwork which he might overlay with his own fantastic embroidery. He was probably attracted to it by the supernatural element, which would appeal strongly to him, not merely as a professed mystic and a dabbler in magic, but as a decadent whose art sought out strange experiences and romantic passions no less than novel rhythms and exotic diction. Under the light touch of Lucian the supernaturalism of the story is merely that of a fairy-tale, not believed in or meant to be ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... fallen again. In a moment she began to draw on her gloves. "Now I'll have to run if I'm to dress and get over to Old Westbury for dinner at eight. Thank you so much, Lee; you've been a godsend. If I were a writer instead of a mere dabbler in paints I'd dedicate my first book to you. I'm so sorry I haven't time to drive you down ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Lincoln had a philosophy of his own, which, strange as it may appear, was in perfect harmony with his character in all other respects. He was no dabbler in divination—astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghostly lore, ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... clear the mysteries. He loves the marvellous, not in the vulgar sense of the word, but as a symbol of perplexity which encounters every thoughtful man in his journey through life. Similar tenants at an earlier period might, with almost equal probability, have led him to the stake as a dabbler in forbidden sciences, or have caused him to be revered as one to whom a deep spiritual instinct ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... having originated the patent-medicine almanac, along with other advertising innovations. The patent-medicine business, however, represented merely one of his wide-ranging interests; he was also a co-owner of vessels plying the Great Lakes, a publisher, and a dabbler in such occult arts as Mesmerism, Phrenology, and Morse's theory of the electric telegraph. In 1855 he appeared as the proprietor of the Daily Republic, and it was perhaps his growing involvement ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... bound, however, in fairness to call the attention of the unwary dabbler in statistics to a point of grave importance in dealing with German finances. The German Empire, so far as expenditure and income are concerned, is merely an office, a clearing-house so to speak, for the states which together make up ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... am afraid to say this was wrong, but it was poor and childish, crippled his walk, and obstructed his higher development. He liked to know himself a benefactor. Such a man may well be of noble nature, but he is a mere dabbler in nobility. Faber delighted in the thought that, having repudiated all motives of personal interest involved in religious belief, all that regard for the future, with its rewards and punishments, which, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, some of his prose speculations ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... would have escaped the notice of almost any other person, to carry his point in such arguments as we might chance to be engaged in. He was feelingly alive to the beauties of nature, and took great interest in any observations, which, as a dabbler in the arts, I ventured to make upon the effects of light and shadow, or the changes produced in the colour of objects by every ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... concerned.... The code is absolute on that subject.... Their challenge once made, to which you, Monsieur Chapron, have to reply by yes or no, these gentlemen should withdraw immediately.... It is not your fault, it is Ardea's, who has allowed that dabbler in spurious dividends to perform his part of intriguer.... But we will rectify all in the right way, which is the French.... And where ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... The dabbler in science and invention often fancies himself a discoverer, asserts his claims, and receives recognition from those who are still more ignorant of the subject than himself. Under this head come the performances of Mr. Bishop and other sciolists ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... the sect is not felt by many more than these conditions personally and corporeally affect? Do you suppose that the detection of Sir Henry Mildmay, and the disappointment of Mr. Perceval IN THE MATTER of the Duchy of Lancaster, did not affect every dabbler in public property? Depend upon it these things were felt through all the gradations of small plunderers, down to him who filches a pound of tobacco from the King's warehouses; while, on the contrary, the acquittal of any noble and official thief would not fail to diffuse ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... boldness of actuality. Milly, gazing in fascination at the creation of line and color and light, realized that here was the work of a new man, totally unknown to her. Its maker was no youthful pupil, stumbling at his set task. No dabbler, this one, no trivial illustrator or petty drawing-room amuser, but a man who had found within himself something long sought for. She shuddered and turned away. So that was what it was to be an Artist! She understood, and she hated it,—Art and all the tribe of ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... age of small oratory. Every man who could string a neat sentence together, scribbled or harangued. It was boorish and an unfashionable thing not to be an author, a poetaster, a little orator, a critic, a dabbler in the arts. At coffee-houses or clubs, wheresoever men foregathered, some fellow would mount a table and harangue his friends. The bloods caught the vogue, little foreseeing that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the parading of ideals ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... ass, old fellow. You're not a poet, you know—you're a happy dabbler in prose; but you've got to wake up—you've got to have some vital experience before you can hope to reach the top. This vicarious loving isn't worth a tin whistle. You're like a soldier in the barracks compared to one who's in the thick of the fight. Wake up, shake yourself, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... higher stage than it had ever before reached, and however much we differ from their judgment and their interpretation of such a man as Milton, they certainly led Englishmen to a better knowledge and appreciation of their own literature; and finally, in Ned Softly the literary dabbler, Will Wimble the poor relation, Sir Andrew Freeport the merchant, Will Honeycomb the fop, and Sir Roger the country gentleman, they give us characters that live forever as part of that goodly company which extends from Chaucer's country parson to Kipling's Mulvaney. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... direction, he continued through years of hard, and often disappointing trials, to find something more complete. He hit upon the discovery that a printed sheet of paper (new or old) moistened with a thin solution of gum Arabic would, when dabbled over printers' ink, accept the ink from the dabbler only on its printed parts and remain perfectly clean in the blank spaces, so that a facsimile impression could be taken from this inked-in sheet. He found that this operation might be repeated until the original print gave out by wear. Here was a new discovery, based on the properties ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... Oberon. "In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he—a literary dabbler himself, I should judge—has the impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after a general sentence of condemnation, with the definitive assurance that he will not ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, a charlatan and a wretched dabbler in necromancy and something of an alchemist, who has lately written the life of another Pope's son—Cesare Borgia, who lived nigh upon half a century ago, and who did more than any man to consolidate the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... who at one time was supposed to have court influence because a dabbler in architecture, much consulted during the building of the Escorial by Philip II. until the auditing of his accounts brought him into temporary disgrace, and the Marquises of Velada, Villalonga, and other ministers, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... which frequently seem to carry them from it. But as the work advances the conduct of him who leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing inconsistencies are reconciled, and when it is once consummated the whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every dabbler in politics will be apt to think he could have done the same. But, on the other hand, a man who proposes no such object, who substitutes artifice in the place of ability, who, instead of leading parties and governing accidents, ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... "A dabbler in science, Mr. Holmes, a picker up of shells on the shores of the great unknown ocean. I presume that it is Mr. Sherlock Holmes whom I ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... said Tiresias, 'but a great toy. You must know that Saturn—until at length, wearied by his ruinous experiments, the gods expelled him his empire—was a great dabbler in systems. He was always for making moons brighter than Diana, and lighting the stars by gas; but his systems never worked. The tides rebelled against their mistress, and the stars went out with a horrible stench. This is one of his creations, the most ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... thing that neither Lady Castletown nor Lady Doneraile has ever heard of the story of the moonlight vision of Lord Doneraile and the pack of hounds. However, there is a man at Doneraile called Jones, a chemist, who is a most enthusiastic antiquarian and a dabbler in the occult sciences, and he takes the greatest interest in all that concerns the St. Legers. Lady Castletown wrote to him, and the reply comes from his brother (I suppose he is away), and that ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... with newspapers, Robert Macaire begins to distinguish himself on 'Change,* as a creator of companies, a vender of shares, or a dabbler in foreign stock. "Buy my coal-mine shares," shouts Robert; "gold mines, silver mines, diamond mines, 'sont de la pot-bouille de la ratatouille en comparaison de ma houille.'" "Look," says he, on another occasion, to a very timid, open-countenanced ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... themselves all over with clay. This we learn from a passage in which Demosthenes describes the youth of his hated adversary, AEschines. The mother of AEschines, he says, was a kind of 'wise woman,' and dabbler in mysteries. AEschines used to aid her by bedaubing the initiate over with clay and bran. {40a} The word [Greek], here used by Demosthenes, is explained by Harpocration as the ritual term for daubing the initiated. A story was told, as ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... arts, the victim of the son's diabolic cruelty when he has no other victim to torment. They keep him for days without food at times, because they say that he responds better to their fiendish practices when the body is well-nigh reduced to a shadow. Oh, I hear them talk! My father is a dabbler in mystic arts. They are luring him on to think he will one day learn the secret of the transmutation of metals, whilst I know they do but seek to make of him a tool, to subdue his will, and to do with him what they will. They will strive to practise ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... had listened to the cross-examination which revealed Jasper as a scientist with something approaching amazement. She had known of the laboratory, but had associated the place with those entertaining experiments that an idle dabbler ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... of this truth, its far-reaching and many-sided significance, is even yet only beginning to be understood; but its bearing upon the study of what we call natural history would seem to be evident. My own experience as a dabbler in botany and ornithology has convinced me that the pursuit of such researches is not at all out of the spirit of the ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... inquest had puzzled him; left him doubtful and uncertain. He was not sure about the jealousy theory. He was not sure about Mrs. Saumarez, from what he had seen of her personally and from what he had heard of her. He was inclined to believe that she was not only a dabbler in politics with a liking for influencing men who were concerned in them but that she was also the sort of woman who likes to have more than one man in leash. He was now disposed to think that there had been love-passages between her ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... employment of his huge staff of servants. Stafford suspected him of being something of a sybarite. His dinners were famous, his cellar was one of the best in London and because of his acquaintances and friendships in the artistic sets, he was something of a dabbler ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... when he wished to improve his mind, to flatter him when he was out of temper, and to entertain him when he was bored. There was hardly one of them that was not thoroughly second-rate. Algarotti was an elegant dabbler in scientific matters—he had written a book to explain Newton to the ladies; d'Argens was an amiable and erudite writer of a dull free-thinking turn; Chasot was a retired military man with too many debts, and Darget was a good-natured secretary with too many love affairs; ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... drawing-rooms of his friends, Morton Serviss was a most welcome guest. His frank, boyish ways, his careless dress, his freedom from cant, his essential good-fellowship deceived the most of his acquaintances into thinking him a mere dabbler in science, a man of wealth amusing himself; but Weissmann, who was qualified to know, said: "He has persistency, concentration, a keen mind, a clear eye, and a ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... and few men noticed her. Yet no one could say that at the present time she did not live a careful life, justifying, so far as eye could see, the protection of the Seigneur, M. Rossignol, a man of queer habits and queerer dress, a dabbler in physical science, a devout Catholic, and a constant friend of the Cure. He it was who, when an effort was made to drive Paulette out of the parish, had said that she should not go unless she wished; that, having been born ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... drawing, cooking, housekeeping, wood-carving, nursing, needlework, when they are studied at all, are studied more professionally and thoroughly and intelligently, and less in the spirit of the amateur and dabbler. So I would say to you, both now and when you leave, show that your education in intelligence has given you wide interests and powers to master all such subjects. Take them ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... he insisted, with that alien note of tenderness still throbbing in his tone. "You are not a dabbler in life. You have never been afraid to stand on your feet, to look at it whole. There is the solid, undeniable truth. It is a woman's glory to help men on to the great places, and the strangest thing in all the world is that there is only one woman for any one man, and for ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dabbler and a failure. What pictures have you painted? Dinky water-colours and nightmare posters. You've never had one exhibited, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... the dabbler despair when nine titles are necessary to catalogue the oysters alone—oysters which vary from the size and independence—and the toughness (be it said) of the clam, to delicate morsels, so crowded and cemented ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... been needed, and the manner in which you have handled the subject will make the book as interesting to the reading public as it is valuable to the Daguerrean artist, or the amateur dabbler in Photography. I have read nearly all of the many works upon this art that have emanated from the London and Paris presses, and I think the reader will find in yours the pith of them all, with much practical and useful information that I ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... throw me off—she would not be quite frank with me—until she had made sure of the other. And in her trouble of doubt, when she was trying to be better than herself, and anxious to have guidance, that was the guide she turned to—the woman-man, the dabbler in paint-boxes, the critic of ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... gulph of oblivion the better. Let the inquisitive and the studious fix their minds on more substantial topics, instead of being led away by gaudy and deceitful appearances. The human head, that crowning capital of the column of man, is too interesting a subject, to be the proper theme of every dabbler. And it is obvious, that the professors of this so called discovery, if they be rash and groundless in their assertions, will be in danger of producing momentous errors, of exciting false hopes never destined to be realised, and of visiting with pernicious blasts the opening ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... helped Oldfield to break the spirit of one commandment, was a brilliant figure in the reign of Queen Anne, albeit, like other brilliant figures of that period, he has passed into the darkness of oblivion. A clever dabbler in literature, an honest politician—a politician with scruples was as rare in those days as he is now—and a man of honour who could drink as much as his friends, the volatile Arthur was, perhaps, best known as the most attractive talker of ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins |
