"Philistine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... children was to return the courteous salutation the Perley ladies had never ceased to bestow in meeting the Boones walking or in company. Now, Dick was the kind of boy that those who know boy nature would call adorable. To the Philistine, without humor or sympathy, I'm afraid he was a very bad boy. He was until late in his teens painfully shy with grown people and strangers; even under the eyes of his aunts and with youths of his own age, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... enveloped me as a dark cloud. In vain I tried to disperse it. Surely there was some way of combating this gigantic evil. Here indeed was the Philistine Giant of Evil. The people were indifferent. The laws were impotent. There was no public opinion on the subject. True, some of my journeys to different countries had resulted in the homecoming of some who had been falsely beguiled into the way of evil, but ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... reckon the love of books. Now this virtue, like courage or liberality, has its mean, its excess, and its defect. The defect is indifference, and the man who is defective as to the love of books has no name in common parlance. Therefore, we may call him the Robustious Philistine. This man will cut the leaves of his own or his friend's volumes with the butter- knife at breakfast. Also he is just the person wilfully to mistake the double sense of the term 'fly-leaves,' and to stick the 'fly- ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... to a wedding reception, and among the serious presents some grinning Philistine drew his attention to an uncouth club—'a wife-beater' he called it. The flippancy had jarred upon John terribly: this intrusive reminder of the customs of the slums. It grated like Billingsgate in a boudoir. Now that savage weapon recurred to him—for a lurid ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... set aside for your college course. Use it for your musical tomfoolery if you insist, and then—get what living you can.' Which was severe but dignified, unpaternal yet patrician. But what does my governor do? That cantankerous, pig-headed old Philistine—God bless him!—he's got no sense of the respect a father owes to his offspring. Not an atom. You're simply a branch to be run on the lines of the old business, or be shut up altogether. And, by the ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... Mr. Ogle, I beseech you. That way fierce controversy and, it may be, disaster lies. Do not stir the Philistine within us. The British nation is still savage under the skin. It has no real love for books, libraries, or librarians. In its hidden heart it deems them all superfluous. Anger it, and it may in a fit of temper ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions, is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargee and far less ornate and symbolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The prosperous English Philistine complains that Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr. Shaw is not in the least making a fool of him; Mr. Shaw is, with laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. G. B. S. calls a landlord a thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... streets of Hastings town— Slowly thread them—when behold, French canary-merchant old Shepherding his flock of gold In a low dim-lighted pen Scann'd of tramps and fishermen! There a bird, high-coloured, fat, Proud of port, though something squat— Pursy, play'd-out Philistine— Dazzled Nelly's youthful eyne. But, far in, obscure, there stirr'd On his perch a sprightlier bird, Courteous-eyed, erect and slim; And I whisper'd: "Fix on him!" Home we brought him, young and fair, Songs to trill in Surrey air. Here Matthias sang his fill, Saw the cedars of Pains Hill; ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... beside him in a manner indescribable, and presently began to extend the circle of this dance among the acres of cooked food. Whatever they leaped over, whatever they called for, became theirs. To see mediaeval Dante thus demean himself struck a kind of a chill of incongruity into our Philistine souls; but even in a great part of the Samoan concourse, these antique and (I understand) quite local manners awoke laughter. One of my biscuit tins and a live calf were among the spoils he claimed, but the large majority of the cooked food (having once proved ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of which Macaulay was so great a master. How he would himself have revelled in the paradox—"that books which were household words with every cow-boy in Nevada, and every Baboo in Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine and a mannerist"; "how ballads which were the delight of every child were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a prize in a public school"; "how the most famous of all modern reviewers scarcely gave us one example of delicate appreciation or subtle analysis"; how it comes ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... did not prove favorable to us politically, while, on the other hand, the Americans who frequently indulged in generalizations about Germany were prone to judge us according to the German-American Beer-Philistine, whom they disdainfully called a "Dutchman." The Americans' view of the German people wavered between these two extremes; but every year opinion tended to incline more and more in the direction of the former. The phantom of a German world-empire, extending from Hamburg to Bagdad, had already ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... in—bring him in, Philistine! I always call my man Philistine, because he has Sampson in his hands. Set him down there," pointing to an easy chair, as the group now entered, headed by ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... to sign a paper like that? or to sign the Ten Commandments? or to promise that ye'd never lie any more? It's one's duty to maintain one's dignity of character, and, John, I want ye to open yer mouth in defense of the rights of liberty on the occasion; and do yer duty, and bring down the Philistine with a pebble-stun, and 'twill be a glorious night ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... plays with her back to the audience when she is speaking and acting, and everybody else on the stage is still but herself," petulantly insisted the Western Philistine, showing no ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... flinching, he held forward his left hand to his newly-arrived visitor. Mr. Cleveland looked terrifically courteous and amiably arrogant. He greeted the Marquess with a smile at once gracious and grim, and looked something like Goliath, as you see the Philistine depicted in some old German painting, looking down upon the pigmy ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... that is most mean and trivial stuff, the vulgar English nature in full force; just such food as the Philistine would naturally provide for his young. He will say he can see the boy fed upon it growing up to be like his father, to be all for business, to despise culture, to go through his dull days, and to die without having ever lived. ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... me! Behold, I am founding a New Movement! Observe me. . . . I am in Revolt! I revolt! Now persecute me, persecute me, damn you, persecute me, curse you, persecute me! Philistine, Bourgeois, Slave, Serf, Capitalist, Respectabilities that you are, Persecute me! Bah! You ask me, do you, what am I in revolt against? Against you, fool, dolt, idiot, against you, against everything! Against ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... his pipe, and I mused upon the ironic fate which had compelled a mathematical genius to make his sole confidant of a philistine lawyer, and induced that lawyer to repeat it confusedly to an ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill. As told by Leithen it was a ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the three white oaks farther to the west form a clump which casts a grateful shade when the sun begins to decline. The seven acres of forest to the east is left severely alone, save where the carriage drive winds through it, and Polly watches so closely that the foot of the Philistine rarely crushes her wild flowers. Its sacredness recalls the schoolgirl's definition of a virgin forest: "One in which the hand of man has never dared to put his foot into it." Polly wanders in this grove for hours; but then she knows where and ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... my strange mission and she murmured, "How noble," I became a very Samson of strength, ready to vanquish an army of Philistine admirers with the jawbone of my inflated self-confidence—provided, always, one queen of ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... Atheist. All these varieties, you see, excite remark. They may be very popular with their congregations; but they are regarded by the average man as the freaks of the Church. The Church, like the society of which it is an organ, is balanced and steadied by the great central Philistine mass above whom theology looms as a highly spoken of and doubtless most important thing, like Greek Tragedy, or classical music, or the higher mathematics, but who are very glad when church is over and they can go home to lunch or dinner, having in fact, for all practical purposes, ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... most outspoken of all that band of protesting spirits who had been so well known in artistic Boston as the Pagans, married Edith Caldwell, there had been in his mind a purpose, secret but well defined, to turn to his own account his wife's connection with the Philistine art patrons of the town. Miss Caldwell was a niece of Peter Calvin, a wealthy and well-meaning man against whom but two grave charges could be made,—that he supposed the growth of art in this country ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... you you were to hear Chopin. I prescribe him for you. He is the Greekiest of the Greeks. THERE was a nation where all the people were artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. Chopin might have written ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... even now be heard re-echoing through the pages of his book on 'The Philistine' (1811). His dramatic power is evinced in the broadly conceived play 'Die Gruendung Prags' (The Founding of Prague: 1815); but it is upon two stories, told in the simple style of the folk-tale, that his widest ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... means, not that certain events actually happened, or that the poetical "machinery" is to be taken as an existing fact; but that the poem is, so to speak, the projection of truths upon the cloudland of imagination. It reflects and gives sensuous images of truth; but it is only the Philistine or the blockhead who can seriously ask, is it true? Some such position seems to be really conceivable as an ultimate compromise. Put aside the prosaic insistence upon literal matter-of-fact truth, and we may all agree to use the same symbolism, and interpret it as we please. This seems ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... rooms with carpets?" exclaimed Antonia. "I never heard of anything so Philistine. Oak parquetry, with rugs that slip about, is the only thing admissible. Better bare boards ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... one ventured to point out that a man might be a good cabinet-maker although he knew the Integral Calculus. If one timidly asked what good purpose was gained by making so many scholars, that man was called Philistine, first; obstructive, next; and other stronger names afterward. And yet no one ventured to point out that all the Professions—and not science only, through the Universities—might ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... Father Marty to the judgment and censure of fathers and mothers. The whole matter looked at from Lady Scroope's point of view was no doubt very injurious to the priest's character. He regarded a stranger among them, such as was Fred Neville, as fair spoil, as a Philistine to seize whom and capture him for life on behalf of any Irish girl would be a great triumph;—a spoiling of the Egyptian to the accomplishment of which he would not hesitate to lend his priestly assistance, the end to be accomplished, ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... democracy. For only in the hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern; thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their orators, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... you wouldn't understand what a triumph it was if I told you. I suppose, papa, you've no idea how Philistine you are. But ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... its theatrical form, to fill the need for something concrete and yet various, something involving all, yet evolved from all; something which shall somehow unite all the scattered rainbow filaments of Our Village into a lovely texture with a design that even a Philistine world can understand. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... the Philistine giant in the effort to bring him to reason. These are the ostentatious violences of a missionary, who would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose is glad to employ a more silent weapon and strike but once. The callousness of a thick-witted auditory lays the need for ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... affect him precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics—namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and according to a man's ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... order to make them talk before company. I cannot be tempted to "come aloft" for these marks of distinction, and, like imprisoned Samson, I would rather remain—if such must be the alternative—all my life in the mill-house, grinding for my very bread, than be brought forth to make sport for the Philistine lords and ladies. This proceeds from no dislike, real or affected, to the aristocracy of these realms. But they have their place, and I have mine; and, like the iron and earthen vessels in the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... you," added Flibbertigibbet; "I must stay a short space with mine honest Philistine, my Goliath of Gath here; but I will be with you anon, and at the bottom of all your secrets, were they as deep and dark as ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... bar your path. Winnington is a good fellow, but a thickheaded Philistine all the same. You spoke to me about him with compunction. Have no compunctions. Go straight forward. Women have got to shew themselves ruthless, and hard, and cunning, like men—if ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a gross Philistine in those days—still am, as a matter of fact—and I could not appreciate the statue. A strenuous life with my Regiment had stifled what little appreciation for such things a more leisured existence might have fostered. I could not ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... it is just what we want. I am sure that the Monitor is still afloat, and that she will yet give a good account of herself. Sometimes I think she may be the veritable sling with a stone that will yet smite the Merrimac Philistine in the forehead." ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... throne of Judah twelve years. The kingdom was apparently prosperous, and was unmolested by external enemies. For seventy-five years Assyria had given but little trouble, and Egypt was occupied with the siege of Ashdod, which had been going on for twenty-nine years, so strong was that Philistine city. But in the absence of external dangers corruption, following wealth, was making fearful strides among the people, and impiety was nearly universal. Every one was bent on pleasure or gain, and prophet and priest were worldly and deceitful. From the time ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... arbitrary tendency of all language to create gradations of caste in parts of speech. It is to this mysterious influence by which some words become "elegant" or "poetic," and others "coarse" or "unrefined," that we owe the contempt in which slang is held by the superficial Philistine. ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... I go Home occasionally. And I used to know the Galleries. (Nervously.) You mustn't think me only a Philistine with—a moustache. ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... school does the great army of industry earn its first experience? Who first employs the untaught hand? Upon Ann 'Lisbeth, untrained in any craft, it was as if the workaday world turned its back, nettled at a philistine. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... and ornament of Coney, that isle of the blest, whose sands he models into gracious forms and noble sentiments, in anticipation of the casual dime or the munificent quarter, wherewith, if you have low, Philistine tastes or a kind heart, you have perhaps aforetime rewarded him. In the off-season the thwarted passion of color possesses him; and upon the flagstones before Thornsen's Elite Restaurant, which constitutes his canvas, he will limn you a full-rigged ship in two colors, a portrait ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... people said? I dare fight well with this giant; and declined from his brother to other of the people. And all this was showed to Saul, and David was brought to him, and said to Saul: I, thy servant, shall fight against this giant if thou wilt. And Saul said to him: Thou mayst not withstand this Philistine nor fight against him, for thou art but a child; this giant hath been a fighter from his childhood. David said to Saul: I thy servant kept my father's sheep, and there came a lion and a bear and took away a wether from the middle of my flock, and ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... we have been saying to each other. You attack my idealism, call me dreamer, and accuse me of being out of joint with the time, which itself is rigorously in joint with the laws of growth. And I class you with the Philistine because of your exaggeration of practical values. I hold that it is gross to respect the fact tangible at the expense of the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... "Philistine," murmured Felix, under his breath, and then vacated his seat at the piano in favour of Julia, who was about to sing a ballad called, "Going Down the Hill," which had been the rage in Melbourne musical circles during ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... "L'Africaine," at the Opera, in Paris, the entire superstructure of the stage—wings, drops, and backs—turned when Vasco da Gama put the ship about. Jadwin having criticised the effect because none of the actors turned with it, was voted a Philistine by Mrs. Cressler and Corthell. But as he was about to answer, Mrs. Cressler turned to the artist, passing him her opera ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... great help, for they were popular and had a nodding acquaintance with most of the inhabitants. They regarded me as a meritorious aspirant towards a higher life, and I was paraded before their friends with the suggestion of a vivid, if Philistine, past. If I had any gift for writing, I would make a book about the inhabitants of Biggleswick. About half were respectable citizens who came there for country air and low rates, but even these had a touch of queerness and had picked up the jargon of the place. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... says, we have enough to keep us fed and clothed and housed. But do thee keep enough of thy inheritance to bring thee safe home again to those who love thee. England is ever grey, Davy, but without thee it is grizzled—all one "Quaker drab," as says the Philistine. But it is a comely and a good land, and here we wait ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... often that they hang with the picturesque lines of the best tailor-made garments. That is why well-fed artists of pencil and pen find in the griefs of the common people their most striking models. But when the Philistine would disport himself, the grimness of Melpomene, herself, attends upon his capers. Therefore, Danny set his jaw hard at Easter, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... am a member of the "Culture-Seeking Club," but actually and at heart I am a Philistine out and out. This pernicious high-art and culture-seeking fever has never caught my practical soul in its relentless grasp. I love not the ways of the social aesthete. Gleams and shadows do not thrill me; sunflowers and daisies do not gratify my hungry soul—or self. Mamma ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... that represses or criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields, the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so easily blighted. Just as the child of six or seven should be encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of his daily life, so now the inner ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... round him in amazement, and his cheeks burned with shame. What were the people doing to allow this boasting heathen Philistine to defy the armies of the living God? Eagerly he turned to the men around him and began to ask them what it meant. The soldiers answered him shortly. No, there was no one who dared to go forth and fight Goliath. The king had promised great rewards to any man who would kill the giant. But ...
— David the Shepherd Boy • Amy Steedman
... sun anew. He left the gates in the grass and dew. He went to a county-seat a-nigh. Found a harlot proud and high: Philistine that no man could tame— Delilah was her lady-name. Oh sorrow, Sorrow, She was too wise. She cut off his hair, She put out ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... of faith, whose heart trusted in the Lord, we shall understand why he could do such heroic deeds. David said: "The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine." Again: "Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand; and I will smite thee, and ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... pardons," the young man put in, "but I venture to remind you that I was not cradled in the forecourt of the temple of the Pythian Apollo, but only in the nursery of a conspicuously Philistine, English country-house." ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Humphrey, without removing his eyes from the fire. He was a somewhat solemn young fellow, and carried the hook and leather gloves of a furze-cutter, his legs, by reason of that occupation, being sheathed in bulging leggings as stiff as the Philistine's greaves of brass. "That's why they went away to be married, I count. You see, after kicking up such a nunny-watch and forbidding the banns 'twould have made Mis'ess Yeobright seem foolish-like to have ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... in a prosaic, commercial, and Philistine age, in teaching the world to love and study the Beautiful, in opening to it the hidden mysteries and delights of art, and in inciting the passion for taking pleasure in and even possessing embodiments of it, that age owes to the great prose-poet and enthusiastic author of "Modern Painters." ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... "The Philistine of Victorian literature, is a person without ideals, the practical man. But just now the fashion is all for the things. Ruskin and Carlyle set it going, and to-day the demand for ideals exceeds the supply. And as a result, we meet with innumerable ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... of work, and I must go to my Patmos in George Street. Ingrained laziness is the bane of my existence; and you don't suppose that with the sun shining down into your bosky dell, and Mrs. Skelton radiant, and Froude and yourself nicotiant, I am such a Philistine as to do ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... it, and shall be very sorrowful." Alexander took this brave Philistine city after a siege of two months, and behaved more cruelly there than was his wont. It was the turn of Jerusalem next; but the Lord had promised to "encamp about His House, because of him that passeth by;" and in answer to the prayers and sacrifices ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... list of those who were to be admitted at all sorts of hours. Reed Opdyke accepted him in mirthful gratitude to the Providence which had arranged so equable a quid pro quo. Prather was manifestly out for copy, despite his constant disavowals of what he termed an envious slander hatched by Philistine minds. Reed Opdyke's sense of humour was still sufficiently acute to assure him that there was every possibility that, at some more or less remote period, he would find a full-length portrait of himself in Prather's pages, a portrait all the more easily recognizable by reason ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... understanding lighted Philip's face not unmingled with the satisfaction of a shrewd Jew who has pleased himself at business. One hundred talents, then, for the best establishment in five cities, in all the Philistine country. But why? Costobarus supplied the ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... Steinberg Abbey above Hattenheim, are of course household words, and the man who said that travelling along the Rhine was like reading a restaurant wine-list had some justification for his Philistine speech. One does not expect to discover the real Steinberg Cabinet in a village inn, and the Johannisberg generally found in every hotel in Rhineland is a very inferior wine to that of the Schloss, and is grown in the vineyards round Dorf Johannisberg. I have memories ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... contains most of the terms—culture, sweetness and light, Barbarian, Philistine, Hebraism, and many others—which are now associated with Arnold's work and influence. The term "Barbarian" refers to the aristocratic classes, whom Arnold thought to be essentially crude in soul, notwithstanding their good clothes and superficial graces. "Philistine" ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... than any social argument or any talk of possible individual danger. The only effective check is the deep inner respect, and we must teach it to the youth, or the whole nation will have to be taught it soon by the sterner discipline of history. The genius of mankind cannot be deceived by philistine phrases about the conspiracy of silence. The decision to be silent was a solemn pledge to the historic spirit of human progress, which demands its symbols, its conventions, and its beliefs. To destroy the harvest of these ideal values, because some weeds have grown up with them, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd's bag which he had, even in a scrip: and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine." ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... worse was the thought that for the least thing, by a mere hair's breadth, he might have taken this affair sentimentally. But clearly Anthony was no diplomatist. His brother-in- law must have appeared to him, to use the language of shore people, a perfect philistine with a heart like a flint. What Fyne precisely meant by "wrangling" I don't know, but I had no doubt that these two had "wrangled" to a profoundly disturbing extent. How much the other was affected ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... know, which Charles II. gave to old Sir Peter, your cavalier ancestor. But the gallery is almost a lumber-room, for the floor is too unsafe to walk upon. And down here, as you see, we are terribly Philistine." ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... Bullen. It's impressionism, you Philistine!—a sort of modified impressionism, you know, to suit the hangers. 'Gad, Bullen, you ought to be a hanger yourself! Bullen, my dear man, if it wasn't that you do know how to paint a ship's side, I would even go ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... universally popular during the Renaissance, and of which Guevara, Castiglione, and Lyly are the most famous instances. The ambition of those who frequent Courts has always been to appear distinguished—distinguished that is from the vulgar and the ordinary, or, as we should now say, from the Philistine. In the Courts of the Renaissance period, where learning was considered so admirable, this necessary distinction would naturally take the form of a cultured, if not pedantic, diction; and for this it was natural that men should go to the classics, and more especially ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... The philistine philosophers will talk of "delusion" and contend that only the perceptions of day are real and those of sleep a mere delusion. But I have said it before: there is no delusion, or - everything is delusion. What realities does the day possess ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... that life is something infinite and unconditioned, and tries to look upon it and live it as though it left nothing to be desired. By method and principle the learned Philistine does the same: he believes that his methods and his principles are unconditionally perfect and objectively valid; so that as soon as he has found them, he has nothing to do but apply them to circumstances, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... her mother say, a few minutes later, "either some son of a Philistine has told that child something, or she has ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... Dragon had scrounched you, squeal 45 and squall— Cabbalists! Conjurers! great and small, Johva Mitzoveh Evoh[a]en and all! Had I never uttered your jaw-breaking words, I might now have been sloshing down Junket and Curds, Like a Devonshire Christian: 51 But now a Philistine! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... attained, and that is to cultivate the habit, which I think many Christian people do not cultivate, of little short swallow-flights of prayer in the midst of our daily work. 'They cried unto God in the battle, and He was entreated of them.' If a Philistine sword was hanging over the man's head, do you think he would have much time to drop down upon his knees, to make a petition, divided into all the parts which divines tell us go to make up the complete idea of prayer? I should think not; but he could say, 'Save me, O Lord!' 'They cried to God in the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... not without significance that this great library still lies open to the public as a part and a notable part of the palace of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if Philistines abound in it the spirit and drift of the English Church have never been wholly Philistine. It has managed somehow to reflect and represent the varying phases of English life and English thought; it has developed more and more a certain original largeness and good-tempered breadth of view; amidst the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position which ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... reason and religion, Roger Purdee," she adjured him, "what air that thar perverted Philistine ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... much might have been spared to us both. But that was not to be!" It is with dutiful respect but with no touch of filial affection that Goethe has drawn his father's portrait in Dichtung und Wahrheit. As the father is there depicted, he is the embodiment of Goethe's own definition of a Philistine—one naturally incapable of entering into the views of other people.[5] Yet Goethe might have had a worse parent; for, according to his lights, the father spared no pains to make his son an ornament of his generation. Strictly conscientious, methodical, with a genuine love of art and letters, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... chance, Saxham"—this from Surgeon-Major Taggart—"in your place; and maybe I'm putting in six worrds for mysel' as well as half a dozen for the patient. For I have an auld bone to pyke wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe, aboot a Regimental patient he slew for me, three years back, wi' his jawbone of a Philistine ass." ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... had not gone from us and that the moderns might write as the ancients by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Dr. Moehrlein was an upholder of the kommers. But his wife, though German-born, behaved like a very Philistine and objected to his constant and unwavering attendance upon these occasions of intellectual uplift. For as the doctor added to the knowledge of the world, he added to his weight. He had identified Brahma with the sun, but had drunk his face purple in the intellectual ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... Zwingli's time, and yet the crumbling north portal remains beautiful, even in decay. As for the interior, it has an exceedingly bare and stript appearance; for, altho' there is good, solid stonework in the walls, the whole has been washed a foolish, Philistine white. The Romanesque of the architectural is said to be of particular interest to connoisseurs, and the queer archaic capitals must certainly attract the notice ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... speaking by Thy delicate mouth made horrid din; "Lo the Philistine lords are nigh"— He woke ere thou couldst scarce begin, And took ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... paused, finger on lock, wondering and hesitating and fearing, till the door was flung open, and I drawn in with two hands shut fast on my own, and two eyes—great blue Ingestre eyes—looking down on me from the face so far above: for he towered like a Philistine. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have refer almost wholly to his musical precocity. It was not such a precocity as that of Mozart, who was playing minuets at the age of four, and writing concertos when he was five; but just on that account it is all the more credible. One's sympathies are with the frank Philistine who pooh-poohs the tales told of baby composers, and hints that they must have been a trial to their friends. Precocious they no doubt were; but precocity often evaporates before it can become genius, leaving a sediment of disappointed hopes and vain ambitions. In literature, as ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... Mabel was polishing her poems with serious thoughts of publication, but with strictest secrecy. No one but her parents and Roderick Vawdrey had been told of these poetic flights. The book would be given to the world under a nom de plume. Lady Mabel was not so much a Philistine as to suppose that writing good poetry could be a disgrace to a duke's daughter; but she felt that the house of Ashbourne would be seriously compromised were the critics to find her guilty of writing doggerel; ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... best in art. He has laid hold not of Catholicism, but of its merest accessories, which it might shake off any day, and him along with them. Indeed, he scarcely makes any pretence at being in sympathy with the Catholicism of to-day, which he regards as almost entirely philistine and degenerate, if we except La Trappe and Solesmes and a few other corners where the old observances linger on. 'It was so ugly, so painfully adorned with images, that only by shutting his eyes could Durtal ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... walking in open violation of the fourth commandment since the days of the Apostles.—Every one that has read the history of this TESTIMONY of God in the ark, must see the mighty power that accompanied it through Israel and Philistine, one of the greatest wonders that ever existed [iv]in this world, a pattern only of what was seen in the opening of the Temple in heaven. In the xiv: 12, John sees them obeying its dictates. In the xv ch. he describes ...
— The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign - 1847 edition • Joseph Bates
... another with earnest blue eyes, and remarked that here was evidently a Philistine who knew not Cimabue and cared not a jot for Giotto; and the first said: "Sir, methinks he who would climb the golden stairs should do so step by step;" and the second said, sadly: "We are but scapegoats, truly, being cast forth by the vindictive ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... David's eyes; he was a bright little fellow and he had not studied Hebrew and Jewish history all the long winter with the Rev. Mr. Seixas without learning a few lessons very helpful in time of need. "Didn't David and his sling frighten the whole Philistine army ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... view, being conscious that his poetry did not answer its demand. Not only in early but also in later poems, he pictured his critics stating it, and his picture is scornful enough. There is an entertaining sketch of Naddo, the Philistine critic, in the second book of Sordello; and the view I speak of is expressed by him among a ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." 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 the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... drinker, for there is no possibility of moderation, and if he is to be saved he must become a total abstainer. He must sign the pledge, and the pledge must be made of a solemn character with witnesses, say his poor afflicted wife and some intelligent self-made Philistine. Perhaps it might run like this: "I, A. B., do hereby promise that I will never buy a classical book in any tongue, or any book in a rare edition; that I will never spend money on books in tree-calf or tooled morocco; that I shall never enter a real old bookshop, but should it be necessary ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... was only a boy, he said, "You are not able to go against this Philistine. You are only a boy, while he has ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... latter-day rules. If it had been a regular knock-out fight, like the contests in the old days of the ring when it was in its prime, Goliath could have managed him with one hand; but the Samson backers played a sharp game on the Philistine by having the most recently amended Queensbury rules adopted, and Goliath wasn't in it five minutes after Samson opened ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... sighing! Vanish hate, And ye friends of sadness; To his chill abode of woe, Let the dread Philistine go, Who would steal ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... of such conversation between any parties. Press home the truth—and like David's pebble it may do its work; but in a fencing match David might have found it harder to maintain his ground. And his overthrow would not have touched the truth of his cause, nor perhaps his own faith—yet the Philistine would have triumphed." ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... let it be remembered that the average Briton of to-day is not the average Briton of yesterday. Three years ago he was a prosperous, comfortable, thoroughly insular Philistine. He took a proprietary interest in the British Empire, and paid a munificent salary to the Army and Navy for looking after it. There his Imperial responsibilities ceased. As for other nations, he recognized ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... They are not a whit more cynical than, indeed they are not so cynical as, those letters of Thackeray's to young Brown, which with all their cleverness make us understand what Mr. Henley means when in his "Views and Reviews" he describes him as a "writer of genius who was innately and irredeemably a Philistine". The letters of Lord Chesterfield would not do much to make a man a hero, but there is little in literature more unheroic than the letters to ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... the text the preceding events have to be remembered. Hezekiah's kingdom had been overrun, and tribute exacted from him. The rabshakeh had been sent from the main body of the Assyrian army, which was down at Lachish in the Philistine low country on the road to Egypt, in order to try to secure Jerusalem by promises and threats, since it was too important a post to leave in the rear, if Egypt was to be invaded. That attempt having failed, and the Egyptian forces ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... people in facing the full force of Egypt seems to deserve our admiration, as much as did the courage of King Albert and his nation in opposing the faithless invasion of Belgium by the Germans aiming at France. There was, however, a difference. Necoh was not invading Judah, but crossing Philistine territory and a Galilee which had long ceased to be Israel's. Some suppose that since the Assyrian hold upon Palestine relaxed, Josiah had gradually occupied all Samaria. If this be so, was he now stirred by a gallant sense of duty to assert Israel's ancient claim to Galilee as well? ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... tame political conclusion by means of a thoroughly revolutionary method of reasoning. The special form of this conclusion springs from this, as a matter of fact, that Hegel was a German, and, as in the case of his contemporary Goethe, he was somewhat of a philistine. Goethe and Hegel, each of them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere, but they were neither of them quite ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise oppression. Even the moral self-esteem of the German middle class is only based on the consciousness of being the general representative of the philistine mediocrity ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Lueneburg at the commencement of the eighteenth century. Next comes a little pastoral movement (C major, three-four time) expressive of David's courage and of his confidence in God. Then a tone-picture is given of the encounter; the heavy tread of the Philistine is heard in the bass, while semiquaver passages, evolved from a figure in the preceding movement, evidently portray the spirited youth. One realistic bar scarcely needs the explanation given by Kuhnau that it is the slinging of the stone which smote the Philistine in his forehead; ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... find England ugly and Philistine. Well, I dont live in it. I find modern houses ugly. I dont live in them: I have a palace on the grand canal. I find modern clothes prosaic. I dont wear them, except, of course, in the street. My ears are offended by the Cockney ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... blessing on the Editor Who let it see the light; Likewise the patient Printer, for He got the colons right; Here's to the "sub," whose special line Was spacing it to fit, And to the cheery Philistine Who lit his pipe ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... cried unto the armies of Israel, and said unto them, Why are ye come out to set your battle in array? am not I a Philistine, and ye servants to Saul? choose you a man for you, and let ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... sealed book, terra incognita, virgin soil, unexplored ground; dark ages. [Imperfect knowledge] smattering, sciolism^, glimmering, dilettantism; bewilderment &c (uncertainty) 475; incapacity. [Affectation of knowledge] pedantry; charlatanry, charlatism^; Philister^, Philistine. V. be ignorant &c adj.; not know &c 490; know not, know not what, know nothing of; have no idea, have no notion, have no conception; not have the remotest idea; not know chalk from cheese. ignore, be blind to; keep in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... in the barley field, it goes on to show us Boaz's great-grandson, David, a worthy man likewise, but of a very different life, marked out by God from his youth for strange and desperate deeds; killing, as a mere boy, a lion and a bear, overthrowing the Philistine giant with a sling and a stone, captain of a band of outlaws in the wilderness, fighting battles upon battles; and at last a king, storming the mountain fortress of Jerusalem, and setting up upon Mount Zion, which shall never be removed, ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... feller had a dispute about the Bible one time, an' he said it was the best readin' the' was, an' I said it was too dry. He read me about a feller in it named Samson, who was full o' jokes an' the strongest man ever was, I reckon, before he let that Philistine woman loco him, an' he read about another feller, just a mite of a boy, who killed a giant with a slingshot in front of an army which had made fun of him an' was all ready to give in to the giant, an' he read me some poems about mountains; an' I had to give in that the Bible was ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... in the progressive way are rare, their lives rude and sorely tried, and their services to mankind beyond price. "Diderot is Diderot," wrote one greater than Carlyle: "a peculiar individuality; whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is a Philistine, and the name of them is legion. Men know neither from God, nor from Nature, nor from their fellows, how to receive with gratitude what is valuable beyond appraisement" (Goethe). An intense Philistinism underlay the great spiritual reaction that followed the Revolution, and not even such of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... he had taken a condescending interest in the fact of his friend's receiving an order, and had admonished him not to lose the chance of "showing up" his sitter and her environment. It was a splendid opportunity for a fellow with a "message" to be introduced into the tents of the Philistine, and Stanwell was charged to drive a long sharp nail into the enemy's skull. But presently Arran began to suspect that the portrait was not as comminatory as he could have wished. Mungold, the most kindly of rivals, ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... time to see the simple and central fact about anything. All sorts of things have been said about the modern Press, especially the Yellow Press; that it is Jingo or Philistine or sensational or wrongly inquisitive or vulgar or indecent or trivial; but none of these have anything really to ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... all that was best and truest in the socially rebellions classes domiciled in London used to make its way; and there men calmly talked over the ultimate chances of social revolutions which would have made the hair of respectable Philistine Marylebone stand stiffly on end, had it only known the rank political heresies that were quietly hatching in ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... and verse is illogical. Carl Sandburg's life of Lincoln is immeasurably more creative in form and substance than his fanciful Potato Face. Intense exercise of his creative power sets, in a way, the writer apart from the life he is trying to sublimate. Becoming a Philistine will not enable a man to interpret Philistinism, though Philistines who own big presses think so. Sinclair Lewis knew Babbitt as Babbitt could never know ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... salt or flavour of any sort. An anonymous writer in "Current Literature" for July, 1907, asks plaintively why this author has been permitted to remain in obscurity and quotes from some of the reviews. In "The Philistine" for October, 1907, Elbert Hubbard takes a hand in the game. He says, "Edgar Saltus is the best writer in America—with a few insignificant exceptions," but he deplores the fact that Saltus knows nothing about the cows and chickens; only cities ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... so happy meeting, there talked one 'Philistine'; who even now, to the general weariness, was dominantly pouring-forth Philistinism (Philistriositaeten); little witting what hero was here entering to demolish him! We omit the series of Socratic, or rather ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... she could possibly have shared in this descent." Huxley, who had waited patiently for the close of the bishop's address, saw immediately the fatal mistake. Turning to his companion beside him, he said, "The Lord has delivered the Philistine into my hands," and, rising, he hurled back at the bishop the indignant reply, "I should far rather owe my origin to an ape than I would owe it to a man who would use great gifts to obscure the truth." The bishop had made the mistake, and the struggle was on. Year by year it raged. One by one ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... him his unique place in the sterile literature of the republic's second century. He stands for a Weltanschauung that is not only un-national, but anti-national; he is the chief of all the curbers and correctors of the American Philistine; in praising the arts he has also criticized a civilization. In the large sense, of course, he has had but small influence. After twenty years of earnest labour, he finds himself almost as alone as a Methodist in Bavaria. The body of native criticism remains ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... HAVE them—and, please God, shall soon have better. For it is not a pleasant thing for a young man, or a young woman either, I venture to say, to have an old voice, and a wrinkled face, and weak knees, and gray hair, or no hair at all. And if any moral Philistine, as our queer German brothers over the Northern fish-pond would call him, say that this is all rubbish, for that we ARE old, I would answer: "Of all children how can the ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... took Smooth pebbles from the brook: Out between the lines he went To that one-sided tournament, A shepherd boy who stood out fine And young to fight a Philistine Clad all in brazen mail. He swears That he's killed lions, he's killed bears, And those that scorn the God of Zion Shall perish so like bear or lion. But ... the historian of that fight Had not the heart ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... had better go back to the hotel and order lunch. It would have been wiser to have ordered it before we left.' We were all so much touched by his penitence that no one had the heart to remind him how a proposition as to lunch had been made by our leading Philistine as soon as we arrived, a proposition waved aside by Sir John as inadmissible until the 'Guardian Angel' should have been seen ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... and unlike temperament form such utterly dissimilar views of the same object. Thus, as Mr. Spencer has shown,[144] in looking at things national there may be not only a powerful patriotic bias at work in the case of the vulgar Philistine, but also a distinctly anti-patriotic bias in the case of the over-fastidious seeker after culture. And I need hardly add that the different estimates of mankind held with equal assurance by the cynic, ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... which would satisfy the not exacting conditions of a nonconformist or Anglican place of worship? You are not surprised to learn that Keble College mistook the 'Light of the World' for a patent fuel, or that the background of the 'Innocents' was painted in 'the Philistine plain.' Who could live even in cold weather with the 'Miracle of the Sacred Fire?' Give me rather the 'Derby Day' of Mr. Frith—admirable and underrated master. What are they if we cannot place them in the category of pictures? They are pietistic ejaculations—tickled-up maxims in pigment of ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Chumbleton if there were any signs of Cardinal College being affected by the new Moral Uplift, but he seemed unable to fathom the meaning of my query. His standpoint was clearly philistine and, I regret to say, distinctly pagan. He had never heard of the Land Campaign, or of Mr. HEMMERDE, Baron DE FOREST or even Mr. HAROLD BEGBIE. His attitude towards Mr. LLOYD GEORGE was unsympathetic. He deplored the popularity of motor-bicycles, but, with a strange and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various |
