"Philistine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conveyed. His enterprise was not seldom rewarded with success, and for a decade of years he continued to preserve an appearance of gentility; but it is plain, even from his own narrative, that he was scarce an artist, and we shall best understand him if we recognise that he was a Philistine among thieves. He lived in an age of pocket-picking, and skill in this branch is the true test of his time. A contemporary of Barrington, he had before him the most brilliant of examples, which might ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of Jerusalem in Christ's day were the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at the 'whited sepulchre' of respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at all. He looked ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... are an incorrigible Philistine," said her father, "and I yield. Tom's father is a broker, and Tom is by way of being a broker too, though I doubt if he is broking very much. May I dismiss Tom for a few minutes ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... the Philistine, never quite knew whether pragmatism was approved or condemned by Schilsky, and once he asked the dark-faced young man what it meant. He was told that pragmatism was a method, and felt obliged to pretend that this enlightened ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... down by the dean, while a host of minor officials prowl hungrily around these greater marauders. Out of the crowd of figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist vicars, abbots "purple as their wines," monks feeding and chattering together like parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop, light of purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the Goliath who sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead this new David slings his sharp ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... reconciled Assembly will not advise; will not interfere. The King confirms the suspension; then perhaps, but not till then will the Assembly interfere, the noise of Patriot Paris getting loud. Whereby your Delilah-Kiss, such was the destiny of Parliament First, becomes a Philistine Battle! ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... a distinctly philistine virtue. Love is sought by those who do not venture out into the world, who fear a comparison with others, who haven't the courage to face a fair trial of strength. Love is sought by every miserable rhymester who cannot ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... that the German system was the right system of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the system, converting the Philistine with machine-guns. Confidence, the confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realization of the long- promised day of the "place in the sun" for the ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... schemes of the party of her paramour, was a sacrifice that a woman of her character was not generally ready to make—in fact, such thoughts did not find lodgment in her brain. In the flattering embrace of the Philistine all noble aspirations ordinarily become extinct. Mr. Wingate's interrogation was followed by a brief pause, which caused Molly to move uneasily in her chair. "I see, Silas Wingate, that you question my sincerity," she said, slowly. "I can't blame you, though. It is perfectly natural ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... second stage of its persecution the censor figures. His Philistine pen passed ruthlessly over everything that seemed to hint at criticism of the Church; but not content with expunging the heretical and the inferentially heretical, the censor at times went even so far as to erase sentiments ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... body itself was rather more interesting that year than had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years before. Things had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie. Tanaduke was a sophomore, with tremendous ears and a way of ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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 of all the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... conclude that in one form or other responsibility is not a fiction but a truth; and, so long as this conviction lasts, the 'Pilgrim's Progress' will still be dear to all men of all creeds who share in it, even though it pleases the 'elect' modern philosophers to describe its author as a 'Philistine of genius.' ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... 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
... considerable 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 do ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... the letters.—Daughter, do you hear? Entertain Lodowick, the governor's son, With all the courtesy you can afford, Provided that you keep your maidenhead: Use him as if he were a Philistine; Dissemble, swear, protest, vow love to him: [83] He is not of the seed of Abraham.— [Aside to her.] I am a little busy, sir; pray, pardon me.— Abigail, bid him welcome ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... a cigar, and he spoke of books to Mr Hare, whom he considered a gross Philistine, although a worthy man. The shadows of the Virginia creeper fell on the red pavement, and Kitty's light voice was heard on the staircase. Presently she appeared, and lifting the trailing foliage, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... and artistic. I'm afraid she'll find me an awful Philistine. You must stand up for ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... been very eminent and distinguished—a shepherd-king, not a mere shepherd. Rawlinson, in a note on this portion of the narrative of Herodotus, suggests that Philitis was probably a shepherd-prince from Palestine, perhaps of Philistine descent, 'but so powerful and domineering, that it may be traditions of his oppressions in that earlier age which, mixed up afterwards in the minds of later Egyptians with the evils inflicted on their country by the subsequent shepherds of better known ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... wild disorder, as he would never have done had not all his childish remembrances of them been embittered by the association of restraint and privation. He actually seemed to hate any appearance of luxury or taste or order,—he was a perfect Philistine. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... They were too well-read in the merciless wars of the Chosen People to feel the need of sparing the fallen; indeed they would have been most foolish had they done so; for they were battling with a heathen enemy more ruthless and terrible than ever was Canaanite or Philistine. The two largest of the invading Indian bands[29] moved, one by way of the mountains, to fall on the Watauga fort and its neighbors, and the other, led by the great war chief, Dragging Canoe, to lay waste the country guarded by ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... his. Along with the torment of doubts that assailed him, thanks to that infernal notebook, the studio kept catapulting itself into a jungle of nerve-racking disorder in which it was impossible to work. And when Mrs. Haggerty fell upon it with the horrible energy of the Philistine and found places for everything, the studio became a place in which no self-respecting painter could be expected to keep his inspiration or his temper. Here again, Kenny felt aggrievedly, was a condition which Brian's presence ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the second time—not in the least disconcerted by what I had said to him. His inbred conviction of his own superiority to a young adventurer like me was really something magnificent to witness. He did me justice—the Philistine-Pharisee did me justice! Will you believe it? He made his remarks next on my good points, as if I had been a young bull at a prize ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... really degrades nineteen-twentieths of individuals below their former place. There is a progress in the domain of law and a falling back in the domain of art. And meanwhile the artists see multiplying before them their bete-noire, the bourgeois, the Philistine, the presumptuous ignoramus, the quack who plays at science, and the feather-brain who thinks himself the equal ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... imagined a squirrel might feel, turning the wheel endlessly in the narrow limits of its cage. Or, to make the image human, his thoughts wandered to the shorn and blinded Samson grinding his tale of corn in the Philistine town. ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... portfolio. "High post," "political canvasser," "manipulation of votes," you will know the exact meaning of these esoteric terms, when, alas, you meet Mr. Hoolihan. For you must know that not every one you meet in Bohemia is not a Philistine. Indeed, many helots are there, who come from Philistia to spy ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... I am a Philistine, it is true, a barbarian caring little for the refinements of cookery. I am not thinking of the epicure, but of the frugal man, the husbandman especially. I should consider myself amply repaid for my persistent observations if I succeeded in popularizing, however little, the ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... mountain, and it may be a question whether his religion be the cause or the effect of a certain spirit, vivid and yet strangely negative, which dwells in such deserts. Walking among the olives of Gaza or looking on the Philistine plain, such travellers may well feel that they are treading on cold volcanoes, as empty as the mountains of the moon. But the mountain of Mahomet is not yet an ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... already been said that Micky felt a natural enmity towards those in his own condition in life who wore better clothes than himself. For the last nine months, Dick's neat appearance had excited the ire of the young Philistine. To appear in neat attire and with a clean face Micky felt was a piece of presumption, and an assumption of superiority on the part of our hero, and he termed it "tryin' ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... Bible was the one that expressed the youthful David's reliance on God when he went out to meet the insolent Goliath: "The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me from this Philistine." The Philistine stood for any and all threatening dangers of soul and body, and this passage cheered the little Italian through many a childish trouble, and many an encounter with the big boys from the village, ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... all, 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 their existence; but that ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... 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, ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... eyes, it may be that he sees somewhat more than we dwarfs, who with our weak eyes climb over him. Many indeed assert that the Blocksberg is very Philistian, and Claudius once sang "The Blocksberg is the lengthy Sir Philistine;" but that was an error. On account of his bald head, which he occasionally covers with a cloud-cap, the Blocksberg has indeed a somewhat Philistian aspect, but this with him, as with many other great Germans, is the result of pure ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the spur of the moment, choose as his confidential agent a venal scoundrel who has just tried to murder him, is, to say the least, a little improbable. Here Schiller was evidently trying to Shaksperize again; trying, that is, to assert the poet's sovereign lordship over the petty bonds of Philistine logic. The Moor's frank exposition of the professional ethics of rascality, the dash with which he does his work, his ubiquitous serviceableness, and his rogue's humor make him a picturesque character and account for his having ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... but it was Rose who understood the situation best and Charles who understood it least. His feelings were torturing but simple. He wanted Henrietta and he could not get her: he did not please her, and that Sales, that Philistine, that handsome, well-made, sulky-looking beggar ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... trifle, "A Message to Garcia," was written one evening after supper, in a single hour. It was on the Twenty-second of February, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-nine, Washington's Birthday, and we were just going to press with the March "Philistine." The thing leaped hot from my heart, written after a trying day, when I had been endeavoring to train some rather delinquent villagers to abjure the ...
— A Message to Garcia - Being a Preachment • Elbert Hubbard
... The Samson Agonistes,—were his life passed like that of Samuel Johnson in dirty garrets, and the produce of it only some bits of written paper,—the Agonistes, and how he will comport himself in the Philistine mill; this is always a spectacle of truly epic and tragic nature. The rather, if your Samson, royal or other, is not yet blinded or subdued to the wheel; much more if he vanquish his enemies, not by suicidal methods, but march out at last flourishing ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... the excited jailer; "the blood-thirsty Joab, who would have had me smitten under the fifth rib. Profane Korah, Dathan and Abiram, whom the earth swallowed up for their bitterness against Moses, were children of light compared with this horrid Philistine." ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... your Bible, lad," put in Arentz with a grave smile. "It was Samson who slew the Philistines; David conquered the giant Goliath, though it is true that he also was a Philistine." ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... took a different view of Ella's share in the business; she knew her better than her mother did, and consequently refused to believe that she was a Philistine at heart. It was her absurd infatuation for George that made her see with his eyes and bow down before the hideous household gods he had chosen to erect. On such weakness ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... marriage resumes itself into a declared hostility to the conventional French system of match-making. Much that she was condemned for venturing to put forward we should simply take for granted in England, where—whichever system work the best in practice—to the strictest Philistine's ideas of propriety there is nothing unbecoming in a love-match. The aim and end of true love in her stories is always marriage, whether it be the simple attachment of Germain, the field-laborer, for the ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... and the Philistine tribes, who lived near the seacoast, never ceased; for the Philistines had made up their minds to make the men of Israel their servants, and King Saul was determined that ...
— Children of the Old Testament • Anonymous
... moderate your present fear and sorrow; and know that if any of yours should prove a Goliah-like trouble, yet you may say with David, 'That God, who hath delivered me out of the paws of the lion and bear, will also deliver me out of the hands of this uncircumcised Philistine.'—Lastly, for those afflictions of the soul; consider that God intends that to be as a Sacred Temple for himself to dwell in, and will not allow any room there for such an inmate as grief; or allow that any sadness ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... according to 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 ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... whole commonalty, which, at present, stands helpless through sheer 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
... of the lion—and how he said to King Saul, "The Lord hath delivered me out of the paw of the lion" [that strong paw which can knock a man down], "and out of the paw of the bear, He will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine;" and, strong in the Lord and in the power of His might, he went to meet the boastful giant of whom everyone ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... had gone 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 instant he saw Winifred's ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... the same the Philistine was an anachronism, a survival from an older world. The day of the Minoan, like that of his early friend the Egyptian, had passed away. The stars of new races were rising above the horizon, and new claimants were dividing the heritage of the ancient world. To the new Greek ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... creative writing to fiction 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 either ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... impression of amiable indolence, Reggie Forsyth lit a cigarette and strolled out into the garden, amused at his own impatience. In London he would never have bestirred himself for old Geoffrey Barrington, who was only a Philistine, after all, with no sense of the inwardness ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Julius's Balliol library; chrome-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas by Old Masters hung above. The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... there is in it. E is the Eagerness shown in the fray, F the Fanatics, who will have their way. G is a Ghost, and oh! there are lots of 'em, H is Heredity, making pot-shots of 'em. I is the Ibsenite so analytic, J is the Jeer of the Philistine critic. K is a Kroll, and a Pastor is he, L is a Lady, who comes from the Sea. M is the Master, speak soft as you name him, N stands for Norway, so eager to claim him. O his Opponents, who speak out their mind, P stands for Punch, where his dramas you'll find. Q is the Question, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... this otherwise 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 Diogenic utterances, not unhappy in their way, whereby the monster, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... and dried—an unpleasant specimen, and by no means valuable from its scarcity. Self-sufficient, assured, with scarce shyness enough for modesty, handsome and hard, she was essentially a self-glorious Philistine; nor would she be anything better till something was sent to humble her, though what spiritual engine might be equal to the task was not for man to imagine. She was clever, but her cleverness made nobody happier; she had great confidence, but her confidence gave courage to no one, and took it ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... Mr. 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... touched too sensitive a chord, and after a vain attempt to control myself, I suddenly burst into hysterical tears, and left the room. They thought it was my strange temper, but I was only miserable that the enemy—my Philistine—was upon me, when he was only lurking in ambush for the time when my weakness would ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... lofty room, with pillars cold, And spacious walls of chocolate and gold; The solid sombre glory Of tint oppressive and of tasteless shine, Dear to the modern British Philistine, Saint, sceptic, Whig, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... 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 this was as nothing compared to that which ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... "Paradise Lost" to the lewd revellers who would have profaned his aristocratic isolation with howlings and brutalities and philistine uproar! Milton despised "priests and kings" from the heights of a pride loftier than their own—and he did not love the vulgar mob much better. In Paradise Lost he can "feel himself" into the sublime ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... he stood and 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 him ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... 22-34, time of Abraham), notably a covenant with Abimelech at Beer-sheba (whence the name is explained "well of the oath''); (see ABRAHAM.) By a pure error, or perhaps through a confusion in the traditions, Achish the Philistine (of Gath, 1 Sam. xxi., xxvii.), to whom David fled, is called Abimelech in the superscription ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... boy of ideals, of visionary and artistic tastes, of crude fresh theories and a queer philosophy of life, full of a passion for Nature and a contempt for facts, on one hand; and the excellent, commonplace, uncomprehending aunt, with her philistine friends and blundering notions as to what was good for him, upon the other. It was an amusing situation, and psychologically very interesting. St Aubyn listened attentively with a sympathetic smile as Austin ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... earlier David 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 to tell ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... were as tough a crowd As Boston anywhere allowed; It was a club of wicked men— The oldest, twelve, the youngest, ten; They drank their soda colored green, They talked of "Art," and "Philistine," They wore buff "wescoats," and their hair It used to make the waiters stare! They were so shockingly behaved And Boston thought them so depraved, Policemen, stationed at the door, Would raid them every hour or more! They used to smoke (!) and laugh out loud (!) They were a very devilish ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... lengthening 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 ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... all. Social conventions prevent us from telling the truth after the fashion of the heroes and heroines of Bernard Shaw. We all know persons who are models of excellence, but who belong to the extreme philistine type of mind. So deadly is their intellectual respectability that we can't converse about certain subjects at all, can't let our minds play over them, can't even mention them in their presence. I have numbered among my dearest friends persons thus inhibited intellectually, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... legitimate joys of existence. Friend Ripley took the trouble to send me this Review, in which I detected an Article of his own; there came also some Discourses of his much to be approved of; a Newspaper passage-of-fence with a Philistine of yours; and a set of Essays on Progress-of-the-species and such like by a man whom I grieved to see confusing himself with that. Progress of the species is a thing I can get no good of at all. These Books, which ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... seen on sailors in prints of the great war, and which came in again a while among the cunningest Highland sportsmen, namely, slops. Let no one laugh, either, at least in contempt, as the average British Philistine will think himself bound to do, at the fact that these men had not only no balance at their bankers, but no bankers with whom to have a balance. No men are more capable of supporting poverty with content and dignity than the Spaniards of the old school. For none are more perfect ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... young man and a goodly," the warriors of Israel found a leader to unite them against their enemies. His reign was passed in constant struggles with the Philistines. David, who followed him, utterly destroyed the Philistine power and by further conquests extended the boundaries of the new state. For a capital city he selected the ancient fortress of Jerusalem. Here David built himself a royal palace and here he fixed the Ark, the sanctuary of Jehovah. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... at Hampstead had never talked to anyone but his fellow-clerks. One evening Watson asked him to dinner at a restaurant and they went to a music-hall together; but he felt shy and uncomfortable. Watson talked all the time of things he did not care about, and while he looked upon Watson as a Philistine he could not help admiring him. He was angry because Watson obviously set no store on his culture, and with his way of taking himself at the estimate at which he saw others held him he began to despise the acquirements ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Commonwealth; Needham was extinguished; most of the Cromwellians had gone over to the enemy, or were hastening to surrender. Blind Milton alone remained, the Samson Agonistes, On him, in the absence of others, the eyes of the Philistine mob, the worshippers of Dagon, had been turned from time to time of late as the Hebrew that could make them most efficient sport; and now it was as if they had all met, by common consent, to be amused by this single Hebrew's last exertions, and had ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... believes 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, and then approve or condemn. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 they are ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the chauffeur, that philistine, who opened the hood and gingerly felt of the heated engine. And the voice of the wind, wandering through the forest, came to them. David heard a long wondering sigh from the ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... add to their worry. And, anyhow, the human figures on your stage (I leave out fairies and superhumans for the moment) are bound to challenge reality by the fact that they are alive. If Mr. BARKER wants to be consistent (and he would probably repudiate so Philistine a suggestion) his figures should be marionettes worked by strings; and for words—if you must have words—he might himself read the text from a corner of the top landing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... 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 to depend largely upon his patronage, and that ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... curious ghostly fragrance, as of Alfred Noyes's lecture, last week, or of "the New Republic" or the "Literary Digest." The most "liberal" of them may even take "The Masses," precisely as people rather like them used to take "The Philistine," a generation or two ago. Among the members of this group are the women who work violently for suffrage—something in which I personally believe, but which, merely because I believe in it, I do not necessarily ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... 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
... him by one of the loose-tongued and grudging kind, as I deem, that Sir Godrick of Longshaw had gotten to him these latter days a new captain, a man very young, and as it were a David to look on in the days before he slew the Philistine. Furthermore, said this grudger, that though the said youth was a tall lad of his inches, and strong and well-knit, he was all untried, and yet was he shoving aside older and well-proven men in the favour of the Knight of Longshaw. In short, the said grudger went on with his tale ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... literature, the most individual trait in his writings sprang from his scorn of mere word-mongering divorced from actual life. "A man ought to have the right of being a Philistine if he chooses," he tells us: "there is a sickly incompleteness in men too fine for the world and too nice to work their way through it." A great man of letters, no one has ever mocked his craft so persistently. A great thinker, he never tired ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... suggested, in order to keep English literature from falling into the abyss of German platitudes, nor to put Aneurin and Taliesin in the place of Shakespeare and Burns, and to counteract by their "suavity and brilliancy" the Philistine tendencies of the Saxon and the Northman, but in order to supply sound materials and guiding principles to the critical student of the ancient history and the ancient language of Britain, to excite an interest in what still remains of Celtic antiquities, whether in manuscripts or in genuine stone ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... only his success in life, but his physical prowess. By God's help he slays the lion and the bear. By God's help he has nerve to kill the Philistine giant. By God's help he is so strong that his arms can break even a bow of steel. It is God who makes his feet like hart's feet, and enables him to leap over the walls of the ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... not to affect your reader, but to 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 proficiency ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... model? I don't know, I have never REALLY known any one who did not show some spot in the sunlight, I mean some side where the artist verged on the Philistine. Perhaps you have not that spot; you ought to paint yourself. As for me I have it. I love classifications, I verge on the pedagogue. I love to sew and to care for children, I verge on the servant. I am easily distracted and verge ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... together there was inevitably an explosion either on the platform or through the press. It could not have been otherwise. In Palestine two opposing civilizations came into collision,—one the Hebrew and the other the Philistine,—and the Philistine went down. In Holland the Dutchmen, working towards democracy, collided with the Spaniards, working towards autocracy, and the Spaniard went down. In England, Hampden and Pym came into collision with Charles the First and Archbishop ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No, sir. The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet. Them scissors is too modern; thar warn't ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... of concealment. The uproar, which had been a mere hoarse growl, began to take shape and form. 'Down with the Papists!' was the cry. 'Down with the Prelatists!' 'Smite the Erastian butchers!' 'Smite the Philistine horsemen!' ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... down Ancient 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... indescribable piquancy about his epigrams and sallies of thought. He is eloquent, he knows how to love, but the uncertainty that appears in his execution is a part of the very nature of the man. The brotherhood loved him for the very qualities which the philistine ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of Saul are the Philistine's prey! Who shall stand when the heart of the champion fails him; Who strive when the mighty his shield casts away, And yields up his post when a woman assails him? Alone and despairing thy brother remains At the desolate shrine where we stood up together, Half tempted ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... reckless sport over the vast broad precipice. It is usual, especially for those who have no gift of description, to say that Niagara is "utterly indescribable," and the Visitors' Book has this opinion repeated by the American Philistine on every page. But that is because those who say so have no proper comprehension of facts stated, no poetic faculty, and no imagination. Of course no mere description, however perfect, would give the same conception of even a pen or a button as would the sight thereof; ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... question now is, Will the promise and the vision ever be realized, or will they fade out and disappear and leave him a Philistine? And lucky if he is not a brute, for the only brute in this world, my friends, is a degenerate man. When you hear a man say that he has cut his eye-teeth, and he has got rid of his dreams and his visions, then may the Lord have mercy on the soul of that ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... understand that David was a man 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 ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... In the mythology, no god falls in love with Minerva. A mannish woman only attracts a feminine man. A woman's power lies in her petticoats, as Samson's strength lay in his hair. Cut them off, and you leave her at the mercy of every brutal Philistine, who now dares not be rude to her because she is sacred. Do you not see that, instead of gaining something, you will lose all?—sink into fifth-rate mannikins, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... Abner and Amasa. Shimei, another dangerous man, was commanded to reside in Jerusalem, on pain of death if he should quit the city. Three years afterward he was detected in a suspicious journey to Gath, on the Philistine border; and having violated the compact, he suffered ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... professional politicians. A Member of Parliament, who must cultivate an immaculately pure reputation, feels that he is also bound to record by his vote how anxious he is to suppress other people's immorality. Thus the philistine and the hypocrite join hands with the simple-minded idealist. Very few are left to point out that, however desirable it is to prevent immorality, that end can ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... just occasion to provoke The Philistine, thy Countries Enemy, Thou never wast remiss, I hear thee witness: Yet Israel still serves with all his ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... representing his deeds. There he was shewn fighting the bear, there taking the lamb from the lion's mouth, and smiting him. There he was pictured with his sling going against the giant Goliath. There he was represented standing over the fallen Philistine and hewing off his head. Look! another picture! his marriage with Michal, the daughter of King Saul. "Whose is this image?" It is that of the conqueror over Amalek. "Whose is this image?" It is David crowned king of Judah in Hebron. ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... Philistine. And was it then so fine To learn to draw the line. (Is there a line to draw?) And must I then For threescore years and ten Worship the laws of men ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... honest, and yet dull. Virtue is her own reward, and art her own. Virtue rewards the saint, art the artist; but men are rewarded for attention to morality by some measure of joy in virtue, for attention to beauty by some measure of joy in works of art. Between the artist and the Philistine is no great gulf fixed, in the sense that the witty "master of the butterfly" pretends to assume, but an infinite and gentle decline of persons representing every possible blend of the virtues and faults of these two types. Again, an artist is miscalled ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... are a miserable philistine, a typical representative of your base species and you are denied a voice when ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... 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
... and in themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its last in the Exhibition ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... long, low-roofed room in which Elfrida Bell meditated, biting the end of her pen, upon the difference it made when a fellow-being was not a Philistine; and it was not in the least like any other apartment Mrs. Jordan had to let. It was the atelier of the Rue Porte Royale transported. Elfrida had brought all her possessions with her, and took a nameless comfort in arranging them ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... sternest command, neither of his 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
... 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 ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... 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
... vulgar in his eyes. Gorgeous Cathedrals with their High Masses and sweet Benedictions, their bannered processions and kneeling peasantry, rose in his memory as he beheld the half restored Church, the stiff, open seats, and the Philistine precision of the St. Cradocke's Old Church congregation; and Anglicanism shared his distaste, in spite of the fascinations of ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... view the declasses but rather those persons who live in a limbo external to society, and refuse the statistic badge. The central figure Osmond Waymark is of course Gissing himself. Like his creator, raving at intervals under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings and with no money for dissipation, Osmond gives up teaching to pursue the literary vocation. A girl named Ida Starr idealises him, and is helped thereby to a purer life. In the four years' interval between this somewhat hurried work and his still ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... in part illusory, is seen in the fact that men of unlike experience 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, the misanthropist, and the philanthropic vindicator of his species, illustrate a like diversity ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... and good luck to it. Peter, in fact, is so interesting a subject if one sees anything of him at all that I believe he'd draw speculation out of any one. There was old Maradick talking about him the other night—fascinated by him and understanding him most amazingly well—another instance of your Philistine and ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... of the image breakers of 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
... opportunity for one of those long-drawn antitheses 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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- leaves' ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... gave a leader in the editorial column, and when the weeklies and monthlies came out they followed suit. These editorials make now to us who were on the inside amusing reading. They were full of Philistine talk and amazement, and generally conceded that Noyes was an innocent dupe, and all more or less doubted if his principal, the mysterious Mr. F. A. Warren, would ever come back ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... come?" Deluded infants! will they ever know Some doubts must darken o'er the world below, Though all the Platos of the nursery trail Their "clouds of glory" at the go-cart's tail? Oh might these couplets their attention claim That gain their author the Philistine's name (A stubborn race, that, spurning foreign law, Was much belabored ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... important work. Yet she could only think of England as the engine of civilisation, as an evangelising power, as the John the Baptist of the nations—a country with a mission. For so beautiful a woman, of so worldly a stock, of a society so in the front of things, she had some Philistine notions, some quite middle-class ideals. It was like a duchess taking to Exeter Hall; but few duchesses so afflicted had been so beautiful and so young, so much of the worldly world—her father was high in the household of an ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... inspired him with an intense interest in German literature and German politics, as representing the ultra-liberal tendencies of the day. Shelley, too, the rejected of Oxford, whose name was scarcely to be mentioned to the British Philistine of the moment, was one of Beddoes' idols, and he joined with two other gentlemen in the expense of printing the first edition of the poet's posthumous works in 1824, afterward withdrawn by Mrs. Shelley. Byron was the popular poet then, and universal Young England ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... 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 Heavy, Hell and punctuation ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... 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? We cannot ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... this being her real calling,—an advice that is thoughtlessly applauded by the majority of men—sounds like the merest mockery, when both the advisers and their claqueurs do the opposite. Schopenhauer, the philosopher, has of woman only the conception of the philistine. He says: "Woman is not meant for much work. Her characteristicon is not action but suffering. She pays the debt of life with the pains of travail, anxiety for the child, subjection to man. The strongest utterances of life and ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... saw that David was only a boy, he said, "You are not able to go against this Philistine. You are only a boy, while he has fought in ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... 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 ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... 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 signs ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... [pi] 3-1/8, and James Smith, Esq., of the Mersey Dock Board: and put hors de combat—which should have been cache[221]—by pebbles from a sling. If Goliath had crept into a snail-shell, David would have cracked the Philistine with his foot. There is something like modesty in the implication that the crack-shell pebble has not yet taken effect; it might have been thought that the slinger would by this time ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... for many years, of the Neue Zeitschrift.] is only known to me by name, as an active and not too moderately Philistine publisher. Personally I have never met him, and therefore I cannot give a decided opinion as to his fitness and suitability for the post of publisher of the Neue Zeitschrift—yet, on the grounds you give me, it seems quite ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... precisely that sort of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the narrower modern sense. It was not of the material and utilitarian, still less of the sordid, kind. The age was the least Philistine of all epochs of English history. We were not yet a nation of shopkeepers. It is inevitable that nowadays an immense proportion of our study and reading should run to social and economic questions, to ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the most curious and significant of recent literary phenomena is the sudden return of the literary man to physical, and so-called 'Philistine,' pleasures and modes of recreation. Perhaps Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe and his donkey. But at the moment that he was valiantly daring any one to tell him whether there was anything ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... statements with regard to a subject upon which she is evidently in entire and lamentable ignorance, and to protest against her aspersions upon the artistic studies of this and kindred societies. He begs to state that true aesthetes are not eccentric (they leave that to lady professors and her Philistine followers); that to dress becomingly is one of the principal objects of life, and that true greatness is achieved as much by the study of the art of dress as by any other noble pursuit or graceful accomplishment. Are not Horatio Postlethwaite, Leonara Saffronia ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... 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 you're ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells |
