Quotes About Amateur

Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur. He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.

Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work.

No man has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training

The invention of IQ did a great disservice to creativity in education. ... Individuality, personality, originality, are too precious to be meddled with by amateur psychiatrists whose patterns for a "wholesome personality" are inevitably their own.

I've returned to being an amateur without any ties or strings attached, which gives me a freedom I never had before.

I'm not putting down anyone that does look at their work in that way, but for me I am a hardcore amateur.

We did exactly what everybody in the country did, watching it. You entered this state of sort of denials. You think, well, it must have been a tragic accident by an amateur pilot. And then you see the next plane coming.

You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

I had - along with my singing and dancing, I was very happy to be born in the hometown of Dylan Thomas. So the government was financing dramatic groups and amateur dramatics and stuff like that.

I am essentially an amateur medecin, and this to me is almost a mania.

In every bio-region, one of the most urgent tasks is to rebuild the community of naturalists - so radically depleted in recent years, as young people have spent less time in nature, and higher education has placed less value on such disciplines as zoology……The times are right for the return of the amateur, twenty-first-century, citizen naturalist. To be a citizen naturalist is to take personal action, to both protect and participate in nature.

Amateur feed on hope. Professionals work.

My father was an amateur filmmaker who shot 8mm color documentaries.

There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite ‘telescope envy’ at gatherings of amateur astronomers.

There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing-perhaps in particular if we learned nothing-our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.

The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own.

When I was a kid at four years old, that's when I started amateur wrestling with my dad and family. And when that's instilled in you, it never goes away.

I was planning to remain an amateur for a while.

Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.

I must admit, the only reason I joined an amateur dramatic society is because I couldn't get to kiss any girls - I was chasing girls all the time - and so I thought if I join it, there might be some love scenes. And there was a particular girl and I thought I might get to kiss Amy. I never did get to kiss Amy but I did get to kiss Elizabeth Taylor, so it was all right, a lot later.

My father was a very good amateur pianist, and he had a collection of books on technique. One of the things he had was a small volume of exercises by Rudolf Ganz, in which Ganz mentions the pedagogical work of the Swiss composer, Émile-Robert Blanchet, who wrote a ton of polyphonic exercises for one-hand. These exercises were a great help for finger independence, which I acquired early on. This might have given me somewhat of an edge, a facility to be able to knock any obstacle that was in my way.

What then is to be the lot of Rossetti's fame and influence? 'An amateur who failed in two arts', it is true; yet it hardly harms Rossetti or touches his standing. On the contrary, it defines both very brilliantly. The small word 'failed' is a small word and little more to artists who are forever going on until they give up over a game that must be lost. Every artist, when confronted by the immensities of art, which is life, must confess to failure. A failure is a thing very relative.

The boundary between expert and amateur was an imposed social-cultural "protection" which actually exposed a number of women to a fatal disease, because decaying matter, as the fireman said of fire (cited in the book's final piece, "Torch Song") "ain't got no rules on it."

Effective science began when it passed from the occasional amateur into the hands of men who made the winning of knowledge their special function or profession.