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Your Quotes for 28 May 2005 - Amateurs

Wa-Tho-Huk was born in Indian Territory near what is now Prague, Oklahoma on this day in 1888. In 1907 he went to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and led the school's football team to great success. He played a little minor-league baseball, then represented the US in the 1912 Olympic Games at Stockholm taking the gold for both the pentathlon and decathlon. The world knew him as Jim Thorpe rather than by his given name. Alas, that minor-league baseball career had been played under this name and when that was discovered he was stripped of his medals. The winners of the silver medals refused to accept Thorpe's gold medals, the IOC finally restored his medals and his place in the record book in 1983, thirty years after his death. Despite Thorpe's outstanding football career after the Olympics, his name will always conjure up the confusion over who is an amateur, who is a professional, and whether or not there should be a distinction.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. But amusing? Never.
     - Edna Ferber, 1885 - 1968

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasureable it my be.
     - Edward Weston

Every artist was first an amateur.
     - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882

Do not quit. You see, the most constant state of an artist is uncertainty. You must face confusion, self-questioning, dilemma. Only amateurs are confident ... be prepared to live with the fear of failure all your art life.
     - W. O. Mitchell

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
     - Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874 - 1936

Amateurs practice until they do it right. Professionals practice until they can't do it wrong.
     - Musical proverb

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