It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.
Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
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.
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.
One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
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.
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.
The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.
It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.
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.
