"Philistinism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of respectability that which artists breathe in common with all other men—respectability, that English moral climate, with its neutral tint and temperate tone, so often sneered at in these days by its new German title of Philistinism, so often deserving of the bitterest scorn in some of its inexpressibly mean manifestations—respectability, the pre-eminently unattractive characteristic of British existence, but which, all deductions made for its vulgar alloys, is, in truth, only the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... tormenting craving to astonish and mystify his kind. The first was wanting in common sense; the second was wanting in seriousness. The Frenchman was violent, arbitrary, domineering; the German was a jesting Mephistopheles, with a horror of Philistinism. The Breton was all passion and melancholy; the Hamburger all fancy and satire. Neither developed freely nor normally. Both of them, because of an initial mistake, threw themselves into an endless quarrel with the world. Both were revolutionists. They were not fighting for the good cause, for ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... every page of what I believe is the most brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were laid aside. The title does not hint at any more than a fraction of the contents. It is a highly original critique of philistinism and gradgrindism in education, library science, science in general, and life in general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive, and as if furnished ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... room she shared with Stephen had not been hastily assembled. Conscious, even fifteen years ago, when they moved into this house, of the grave Philistinism of the upper classes, she and Stephen had ever kept their duty to aestheticism green; and, in the matter of their bed, had lain for two years on two little white affairs, comfortable, but purely temporary, that they might give themselves a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... cause, and one cause above all. Far more than by the helplessness of an aristocracy whose day is fast coming to an end, far more than by the rawness of a lower class whose day is only just beginning, we are emperilled by what I call the "Philistinism" of our middle class. On the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on the side of morals and feeling, coarseness; on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligence,—this is Philistinism. Now, then, is the moment for the greater delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic peoples ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold |
