Philistines Quotes

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  • Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.

    1967 Interview in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Spring.
  • I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.

    Scottish Review of Books Interview, www.scottishreviewofbooks.org. October 19, 2009.
  • [There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.

    William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1982). “Essays in Religion and Morality”, p.128, Harvard University Press
  • When temptation comes your way, name that boastful, deceitful giant “Goliath!” and do with it as David did to the Philistine of Gath.

  • Next to the defeated politician, the writer is the most vocal and inventive griper on earth. He sees hardship and unfairness wherever he looks. His agent doesn’t love him (enough). The blank sheet of paper is an enemy. The publisher is a cheapskate. The critic is a philistine. The public doesn’t understand him. His wife doesn’t understand him. The bartender doesn’t understand him.

    Wife   Enemy   Agents  
    FaceBook post by Peter Mayle from May 29, 2011
  • Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.

    "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.
  • Do you recall the laughter of the Philistines at the helpless Sampson? You can hear the echo of that laughter to-day, as the church, shorn of her strength by her own sin, is an object of ridicule to the world, who cry in derision, "Where is your boasted triumph and your Millennial glory?

    "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 147, 1895.
  • Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

    Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated”, p.412, Vintage
  • In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

    Art   Real   Criticism  
    Evergreen Review Dec. 1964
  • That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.

    Book   Heart   Optimism  
  • I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon this philistine equation between literature and liberalism and human goodness, and pay some attention to the darker, ambiguous, and often muddled energies and motivations that shape a work of art. If we do this, we can appreciate a writer like Céline or Gottfried Benn without worrying whether they conform to existing notions of political incorrectness.

    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • Why can't the black man have a God? What's so wrong when a black man says his God will protect him form his white foe? If Jehovah can slay Philistines for the Jews, why can't Allah slay crackers for the so-called Negro?

    Men   White   Black  
    Source: teachingamericanhistory.org
  • It's extraordinary to think that if you walked into a room and said you had never heard of Hamlet, you would be regarded as a Philistine. But you could walk into the same room and say, 'I don't know what a proton is,' and people would just laugh and say, 'Why should you know?'

  • A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.

    Ideas   Groups   Interest  
    Vladimir Nabokov (2017). “Lectures on Russian Literature”, p.309, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

    Art   Hate   Culture  
  • Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.

    Hero   Winning   Boys  
  • You all have learned reliance On the sacred teachings of Science, So I hope, through life, you will never decline In spite of philistine Defiance To do what all good scientists do. Experiment. Make it your motto day and night. Experiment. And it will lead you to the light.

    Cole Porter (1954). “103 lyrics”
  • Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

    Orson Welles, Mark W. Estrin (2002). “Orson Welles: Interviews”, p.141, Univ. Press of Mississippi
  • Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

    Culture and Anarchy preface (1869)
  • The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

    Art   Atheism   Age  
    Oscar Wilde (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated)”, p.1618, Delphi Classics
  • The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe. the forces that make it tick, the stuff it's made of; the origin of living things, and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of; like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

  • A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.

    Reality   Boredom   Needs  
    "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life". Book by Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. by E. Payne, Vol. 1, p. 345, 1974.
  • I'm quite squeamish, really. I'm philistine and unsophisticated - not because of my great discerning palate but other reasons. Some are moral grounds, some texture.

    Texture   Moral   Reason  
  • Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

    Real   Book   Ideas  
    Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage
  • A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines

  • It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

    Karl Marx (2018). “The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings: & Selected Writings”, p.11, Pan Macmillan
  • No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.

  • Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

    Simple   May   Trinidad  
    "Reluctant hero" by Caryl Phillips, www.theguardian.com. Ocotber 11, 2001.
  • The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men.

    Men   Culture   Burden  
    Georg Brandes (2015). “Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)”, p.6, WILLIAM HEINEMANN
  • I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

    Wall   Tired   Air  
    Charles Lamb, Thomas Noon Talfourd (1838). “The letters of Charles Lamb, with a sketch of his life. The poetical works”, p.196
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