Top 47 Philistine Quotes
#1. Tell David that all I want for the bride price is 100 Philistine foreskins!
Anonymous
#2. I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.
Quentin Crisp
#3. When I made some observation about linguistic affinity and heredity and Freud - so obvious, I worried that I sounded like a philistine - Ana gave a startled, gargled laugh. Her already enormous eyes grew even wider. And I was immediately engulfed in a warm, prickly compunction.
Alena Graedon
#4. 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?'
Robert Winston
#5. She's like a Philistine on a Sunday, the way she won't take but so many steps a day. Except every day's Sunday around here.
Kathryn Stockett
#6. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.
H.P. Lovecraft
#7. 1SA17.9 If he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants: but if I prevail against him, and kill him, then shall ye be our servants, and serve us. 1SA17.10 And the Philistine said, I defy the armies of Israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together.
Anonymous
#8. Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.
Matthew Arnold
#9. 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.
Susan Sontag
#11. When temptation comes your way, name that boastful, deceitful giant "Goliath!" and do with it as David did to the Philistine of Gath.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#12. Whatever," I said. "It's getting cloying in here. Are we there yet?" He smiled. "Jerk." "Wuss." "Jackass." "Pansy." "Philistine." "Dandysprat." "Butthead." "Whiner ...
Jim Butcher
#13. No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
Vladimir Nabokov
#14. Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V.S. Naipaul
#15. To speak the truth is the most difficult of all arts, for in its "pure" form, not connected with the interests of individuals, groups, classes, or nations, truth is almost completely unsuitable for use by the Philistine and is unacceptable to him.
Maxim Gorky
#16. A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#18. I could go on and on. But that is just what gardening is, going on and on. My philistine of a husband often told with amusement how a cousin when asked when he expected to finish his garden replied 'Never, I hope'. And that, I think, applies to all true gardeners.
Margery Fish
#19. 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.
Michael Longley
#20. 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.
Ricky Gervais
#21. It's only because I feel like such a philistine spending all that time in hair and makeup that I started to knit. I used to spend that time studying Italian and French. Then after I had two kids, my brain turned to mush and I took up knitting.
Felicity Huffman
#22. You stupid chick ... nun ... whatever. I'm a tenth-degree black belt in Korean Karate!" "But you don't have the power of God, you uncircumcised philistine!
James Scott Bell
#23. The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
Oscar Wilde
#24. 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
#25. 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.
Vladimir Nabokov
#26. One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.
Pauline Kael
#27. The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.
Louis Dudek
#28. The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.
Colin Firth
#29. I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I'm a philistine. I like the good life too much; I'm not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.
Anthony Hopkins
#30. I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.
Evelyn Waugh
#31. There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.
Anton Chekhov
#32. PHILISTINE, n. One whose mind is the creature of its environment, following the fashion in thought, feeling and sentiment. He is sometimes learned, frequently prosperous, commonly clean and always solemn.
Ambrose Bierce
#33. He was clearly marked with the stamp of the Philistine.
Agatha Christie
#34. Philistine - a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species.
Leslie Stephen
#35. Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
Ambrose Bierce
#36. It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine.
Tom Bissell
#37. If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
Lionel Trilling
#38. 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.
Louis Kronenberger
#39. It has been wisely said, "that well may thy guardian angel suffer thee to lose thy locks, when thou darest wilfully to lay thy head in the lap of temptation!" Was it not easier for the hero of Judaea to avoid the touch of the fair Philistine, than to elude her power when held in her arms?
Jane Porter
#40. It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.
Germaine Greer
#41. A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#42. In response to [the Philistine] threat [in the ninth century B.C.], the Hebrews could no longer rely on the leadership of 'judges,' ad hoc military leaders (some of them, peculiarly, women; perhaps reflecting as feminists claim, and earlier matriarchal society).
Norman F. Cantor
#44. A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.
Karl Kraus
#45. You didn't want Mather to have the bowls, and you didn't want him to have me." He stared a moment. Then he leaned to her, suddenly fierce. "When I saw you, I knew I had to take you away from him. He had no idea what you were worth, just like he can't price the damn bowls. He's a philistine.
Jennifer Ashley
#46. 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
#47. 1SA17.10 And the Philistine said, I defy the armies of Israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together. 1SA17.11 When Saul and all Israel heard those words of the Philistine, they were dismayed, and greatly afraid. 1SA17.12 Now David was the son
Anonymous
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