philistine quotes

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Let no one's heart fail because of him; your servant will go and fight with this Philistine. Let no one's heart fail because of him; your servant will go and fight with this Philistine.

unknown author

David

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Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the wadi, and put them in his shepherd s bag, in the pouch; ... - MORE Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the wadi, and put them in his shepherd s bag, in the pouch; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine.

unknown author

David

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You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are just a boy, and he has been a warrior from his youth... - MORE You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are just a boy, and he has been a warrior from his youth. .

unknown author

David | soldiers | battles

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Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a "joke." - MORE Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a "joke."

Ambrose Bierce

jokes and jokers

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There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and u... - MORE There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

mediocrity | virtue

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They were fanatical men and women, young and old, all deeply touched by the great rousing call of the revolution, gladly willing t... - MORE They were fanatical men and women, young and old, all deeply touched by the great rousing call of the revolution, gladly willing to fight for the sake of humanity and to sacrifice themselves. There were strangely excited and intense figures among them, believers: believers in this world and utopians who dreamed of eternal peace. And though they were weak and they were few, they towered miles above the miserable figures of the little philistine Ebert and the wooden Noske with his mercenaries, who would soon raise their cudgels and smash them.

Alfred Döblin

revolution | revolutionaries

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One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

Pauline Kael

culture

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A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored. - MORE A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.

Karl Kraus

art | boredom

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America's two most important intellectual forebears are conceivably Franklin and Emerson. Franklin, however, makes us a little une... - MORE America's two most important intellectual forebears are conceivably Franklin and Emerson. Franklin, however, makes us a little uneasy. Poor Richard is at once too goody-goody and too worldly. He argues the prudential approach to life almost too well: he blends copybook morality with eighteenth-century realism; his is the philosophy of the main chance without the cushioning of the noble motive. The special quality in Franklin is that he foreshadowed, with his philistine counsel, what America was to become, while indicating, through his unflinching worldliness, what it would cease to be. The better, the more central, the more congenial spokesman was Emerson, whose gift for giving a special emphasis and elevation to words has offered us a method for sliding over or circumventing things; whose fine aphorisms are the ancestors, at times even the blood brothers, of our trademarks and slogans; whose own transcendental visions coagulated or curdled into a great variety of mystical con-games; and whose deep concern for ideas could be made a kind of evasion of realities. Unlike Poor Richard, Emerson doesn't show us up—nor for that matter, pin us down. He is genuinely great without being uncomfortably specific.

Louis Kronenberger

Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Franklin, Benjamin

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Twenty-five or thirty years ago it was natural for a girl to look forward to marriage as embodying all that was of consequence in ... - MORE Twenty-five or thirty years ago it was natural for a girl to look forward to marriage as embodying all that was of consequence in life. Not to have done so would have stamped the bold Philistine with the fatal brand of eccentricity; and had she perchance gone yet farther and dared to fling conventionality to the winds by earning her bread in a sphere of employment hitherto confined to the sterner sex, her genteel acquaintances would have passed by on the other side, not so much from a snobbish sense of superiority as from a deep-rooted conviction that the unfortunate woman in question had deliberately plunged into the very vortex of sin and humiliation.

Clara Lanza

marriage | employment of women

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