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 philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won’t bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored. Karl Kraus
The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art. Oscar Wilde
One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. Pauline Kael
Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light. Matthew Arnold
The detective novel is the art-for-art’s-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on. V S Pritchett
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. Vladimir Nabokov