Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light. — Matthew Arnold
One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. — Pauline Kael
The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art. — Oscar Wilde
The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class. — Louis Dudek
The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. — Oscar Wilde
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. — Oscar Wilde
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly. — Matthew Arnold
Civilization -- a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures. — Malcolm Muggeridge
People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians. — George Lucas
Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke. — Ambrose Bierce
PESSIMISM- philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. — Ambrose Bierce
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. — G. K. Chesterton
The ***** is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent. — Che Guevara
I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization - you can't just swallow it whole. — Frank Zappa
Short Philistine Quotes
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. — Susan Sontag
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. — Vladimir Nabokov
A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines — Vladimir Lenin
Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round. — Vladimir Nabokov
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism. — V. S. Pritchett
The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men. — Georg Brandes
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. — V. S. Naipaul
Philistine Image Quotes
Some Quotes
Love, friendship, laughter... Some of the best things in life really are free. — Bob Marley
In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. — Albert Schweitzer
Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet. — Bob Marley
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. — Barack Obama
Now, some of the most dangerous places for women to be in the world are modern, Western, rich European countries. Why? One reason. Islamic immigration - it's got to stop. — Milo Yiannopoulos
Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage. — Winston Churchill
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. — Roberta Flack
I never thought of it as God. I didn't know what to call it. I don't believe in devils, but demons I do because everyone at one time or another has some kind of a demon, even if you call it by another name, that drives them. — Gene Wilder
Found Peace Quotes
Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering. Trying to run away from suffering is actually to run toward it. — Ajahn Chah
In countries where people have to flee their homes because of persecution and violence, political solutions must be found, peace and tolerance restored, so that refugees can return home. In my experience, going home is the deepest wish of most refugees. — Angelina Jolie
Ultimately, leadership is about the strength of one's convictions, the ability to endure the punches, and the energy to promote an idea. And I have found that those who do achieve peace never acquiesce to obstacles, especially those constructed of bigotry, intolerance, and inflexible tradition. — Benazir Bhutto
True and lasting inner peace can never be found in external things. It can only be found within in. And then, once we find and nurture it with ourselves, it radiates outward. — Buddha
For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. — Nikola Tesla
Making peace, I have found, is much harder than making war. — Gerry Adams
The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful. — George Wald
The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self. — Albert Einstein
The key to the utilization of atomic energy for world peace will be found in the will of all people to restrict its use for the betterment of mankind. — Leslie Groves
We all believe we have found the finest of diktat that applies our perfect future, but do we believe the world needs referees. — Rudolf Hess
Finding True Peace Quotes
From the world’s perspective, there are many places you can go to find comfort. But there is only one place you will find a hand to catch your tears and a heart to listen to your every longing. True peace comes only from God. — Charles Stanley
There is no true healing unless there is a change in outlook,
peace of mind and inner happiness — Edward Bach
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. — Carl Sandburg
To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him. — Buddha
To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him. — Buddha
The person who finds peace inside and lives it, is the one who teaches what true peace is. — Byron Katie
The cross is like a walnut whose outer rind is bitter, but the inner kernel is pleasant and invigorating. So the cross does not offer any charm of outward appearance, but to the cross-bearer its true character is revealed, and he finds in it the choicest sweets of spiritual peace. — Sadhu Sundar Singh
The heart and mind can find peace and harmony by contemplating the transcendental nature of the true self as supreme effulgent life. — Patanjali
We are not in the home finding business, although it is certainly true that we do find homes from time to time for the kind of animals people are looking for. Our service is to provide a peaceful and painless death to animals who no one wants. — Ingrid Newkirk
If we want there to be peace in the world, we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That’s the true practice of peace. — Pema Chodron
Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them. — Orson Welles
The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think. — Colin Firth
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. — Susan Sontag
PHILISTINE, n. One whose mind is the creature of its environment, following the fashion in thought, feeling and sentiment. He is sometimes learned, frequently prosperous, commonly clean and always solemn. — Ambrose Bierce
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it. — Dmitri Shostakovich
To speak the truth is the most difficult of all arts, for in its "pure" form, not connected with the interests of individuals, groups, classes, or nations, truth is almost completely unsuitable for use by the Philistine and is unacceptable to him. — Maxim Gorky
You all have learned reliance
On the sacred teachings of Science,
So I hope, through life, you will never decline
In spite of philistine Defiance
To do what all good scientists do.
Experiment.
Make it your motto day and night.
Experiment.
And it will lead you to the light. — Cole Porter
There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue. — Anton Chekhov
England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines. — Hanif Kureishi
A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. — Vladimir Nabokov
A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities. — Arthur Schopenhauer
What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities. — Hunter S. Thompson
Australia's is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction. — Robin Boyd
Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy. — John Carroll
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
A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical. — Conrad Black
Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don't understand you? It's because you are the answer to Samson's riddle. You are the honey in the lion. — Thomas Harris
The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den. — Lewis H. Lapham
Why can't the black man have a God? What's so wrong when a black man says his God will protect him form his white foe? If Jehovah can slay Philistines for the Jews, why can't Allah slay crackers for the so-called Negro? — Malcolm X
I'm quite squeamish, really. I'm philistine and unsophisticated - not because of my great discerning palate but other reasons. Some are moral grounds, some texture. — Ricky Gervais
With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it. — Leon Trotsky
It has been wisely said, "that well may thy guardian angel suffer thee to lose thy locks, when thou darest wilfully to lay thy head in the lap of temptation!" Was it not easier for the hero of Judaea to avoid the touch of the fair Philistine, than to elude her power when held in her arms? — Jane Porter
I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art. — Michael Longley
No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke. — Vladimir Nabokov
I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won. — Quentin Crisp
He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep. — Louis Kronenberger
The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser. — Vladimir Nabokov
Do you recall the laughter of the Philistines at the helpless Sampson? You can hear the echo of that laughter to-day, as the church, shorn of her strength by her own sin, is an object of ridicule to the world, who cry in derision, "Where is your boasted triumph and your Millennial glory? — Abbott Eliot Kittredge
Philistine - a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species. — Leslie Stephen
A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine. — Arthur Schopenhauer
You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction -- the wisecrack. — W. Somerset Maugham
Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of what is already known. Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies. — Susan Sontag
Any test that turns on what is offensive to the communitys standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they dont like, provided the matter relates to sexual impurity or has a tendency to excite lustful thoughts. This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win. — William O. Douglas
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy. — Aldous Huxley
In Conclusion
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