If the artist is unsuccessful, we consider him a mere dilettante.

A fellow dilettante in the art had confidentially informed him of its whereabouts, adding that he himself despaired of ever obtaining it.

Into lonely prisons with improvident artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy hymns with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies in which it learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were shut up in it; then again to the gentle dilettante who calmed it down with easy melodies until it answered him softly as in the days of the old maestros.

They would speak of a modern Keats as a self-indulgent dilettante; of a modern Shelley as an immoral Republican.

It must have been shortly after this that Marivaux returned to Paris to continue his studies, and possibly to prepare himself for the life of a literary dilettante.

You know that it is not to go, like the daughters of Zion in Isaiah's time, with mincing gait, and borrowed head-gear, and tasteless finery, the head well-nigh empty, the heart full of little save vanity and vexation of spirit, busy all the week over cheap novels and expensive dresses, and on Sunday over a little dilettante devotion.

He proceeds in the coolest manner to draw with unusual distinctness the shallow dilettante, the sentimentalist, the egotist, and the hypocrite.

The second book is dedicated to another illustrious name, the elder Lucullus, not long deceasedhalf-statesman, half-dilettante, "with almost as divine a memory for facts", says Cicero, with something of envy, "as Hortensius had for words".

I don't want you to be an amiable dilettante.

How can I be anything but a wretched dilettante, when I have no principles to ground my criticism on, beyond bosh about 'The Beautiful'?