Top 100 Quotes About Bourgeois
#1. If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
Lionel Trilling
#2. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total.
Louise Bourgeois
#3. Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning.
Louise Bourgeois
#4. How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?
John Maynard Keynes
#5. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it.
Louise Bourgeois
#6. I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.
Michael Caine
#7. During the eighties and nineties, people wanted to be chic, elegant, bourgeois.
Donatella Versace
#8. Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented - which is what fear and anxiety do to a person - into something whole.
Louise Bourgeois
#9. It was this that frightened me
the sense that behind the grande amoureuse lay concealed a little bourgeoise who wanted security in love.
Anais Nin
#10. Space is something that you have to define. Otherwise, it is like anxiety, which is too vague. A fear is something specific. I like claustrophobic spaces, because at least then you know your limits.
Louise Bourgeois
#11. We do not understand democracy in its bourgeois meaning
of babbling, lack of discipline, anarchy. We understand democracy as the active participation of the citizens in formulating and implementing the Party's policy.
Nicolae Ceausescu
#12. The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
Karl Marx
#13. Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.
Norman Podhoretz
#14. One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.
Paulo Freire
#15. The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
Amiri Baraka
#16. It's such a paradox. You come from this place where you want fame; you don't want to be bourgeois, but you want to be successful. You want to be accepted, but you also want to be going against the grain. You want to be on the outside, but you want to be on the inside.
Dan Colen
#17. Feminism is not inherently bourgeois, but bourgeois feminism is the only one given voice in our society. That is why women's issues discuss glass ceilings rather than dirt floors.
James Rozoff
#18. The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
Honore De Balzac
#19. And he had been very badly treated by a girl too. He had thought her a really civilised and adult personality, and then she had unexpectedly revealed that she was a mass of bourgeois prejudices and monogamic instincts.
C.S. Lewis
#20. Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women.
Nadezhda Krupskaya
#21. I think of myself as being a bit of a wimp deep down - a bourgeois wimp - and I'm fighting that. I think all Brits are, maybe.
Helen Mirren
#22. Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting. Maybe because it is newer. The investigation of ugliness is, to me, more interesting than the bourgeois idea of beauty. And why? Because ugly is human.
Miuccia Prada
#23. I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.
Louise Bourgeois
#24. The enmity of such a party towards Socialism does not mean that the members are only prejudiced against it because they do not know it; it means that they are possessed of bourgeois ideas, and wish to determine their policy accordingly.
Karl Radek
#25. It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.
Louise Bourgeois
#26. In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.
Jane Hamilton
#27. To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.
Jules Renard
#28. An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence - such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.
Vladimir Lenin
#29. Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.
Louise Bourgeois
#30. My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets?
Peter Greenaway
#31. Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
Steven Pinker
#32. Commerce they say, encourages the bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work,self -reliance,and self discipline.
Gurcharan Das
#33. I really think it's a white, bourgeois idea to pretend that you don't have influences. It seems to be the obsession strictly of white people in college.
Billy Corgan
#34. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois failure.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#35. Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being "too attached to her family," which was condemned as a "bourgeois habit," and had to see less and less of her own mother.
Jung Chang
#36. I love the razor's edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can't bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is.
Hanif Kureishi
#37. I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me ... I don't know which makes me feel worse.
Thomas Mann
#38. What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#39. Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing.
Louise Bourgeois
#40. In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.
John N. Gray
#41. Most of the time, feelings just seem to get in the way. They're a luxury for the idle, a bourgeois concept. Feelings are overrated.
Nick Cave
#42. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
Karl Marx
#43. I'd never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug.
Jonathan Lethem
#44. Bourgeois society is not fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois women's movement, which is proven by the fact that in various states reforms of private and public laws concerning women have been initiated.
Clara Zetkin
#45. 'Snow' is my most popular book in the United States. But in Turkey, it was not as popular as 'My Name is Red,' or even 'The Museum of Innocence,' because the secular leaders didn't want this bourgeois Orhan trying to understand these head-scarf girls.
Orhan Pamuk
#46. The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.
Hermann Hesse
#47. I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro.
Charles De Gaulle
#48. I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.
Louise Bourgeois
#50. I'm not at all an active feminist. On the contrary, I'm a bourgeois. I love family life, I love doing the same thing every day.
Carla Bruni
#51. Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#52. Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.
Raya Dunayevskaya
#53. See, I don't like places where people can't dance - don't like clubs or theatres where a bunch of bourgeois people sit around tip, tip, tipping their fingers.
Etta James
#54. It is not just a question of blowing up a building or shooting a prime minister. Such bourgeois horseplay is not contemplated. Our operation must be delicate, refined and aimed at the heart of the Intelligence apparat of the West.
Ian Fleming
#55. There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.
Anton Chekhov
#56. Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois.
Le Corbusier
#58. The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.
Aleksandar Hemon
#59. The piano is the social instrument par excellence ... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
Jacques Barzun
#60. In the '60s, I thought golf was bourgeois, so I didn't play at all for 20 years.
Jerry Jeff Walker
#61. Now it was all over. Once it had done its job, the plebs had been bled white in the interests of public hygiene, while the jovial bourgeois lorded it over the country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the contagiousness of his stupidity.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#62. The rise of man from the animal to the human level was prolonged by the necessity of rising from a state of barbarism and violence to one of order and peace.
Leon Bourgeois
#63. Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions.
Ernest Mandel
#64. You've done the bourgeois thing, perhaps, but let's not call that love.
Marianne Williamson
#65. In Russia no one is surprised when an official accepts a bribe while at the same time portraying the state as some sacred entity to which the bourgeois should pay homage. This all sounds absurd. But for Russians it is completely normal.
Vladimir Sorokin
#66. I am starting a collection of only right-hand gloves. It's ever so bourgeois to have two.
Libba Bray
#67. A work of art doesn't have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn't touch you, I have failed.
Louise Bourgeois
#68. The subject of pain is the business I am in - to give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.
Louise Bourgeois
#69. There was a contradiction within Vikas, an open wound: though he was fascinated by the poor, good at joshing with them, he was afraid, thanks to his bourgeois background, of being perceived as poor. Poverty equaled failure.
Karan Mahajan
#70. I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of the Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties ... Thirty years later, we're still stuck with the ["nice" girl].
Camille Paglia
#71. The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.
Rene Girard
#72. A man who needs the unusual to make him "wonder" shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being. The itch for sensation, even though disguised in the mask of Boheme, is a sure indication of a bourgeois mind and a deadened sense of wonder.
Josef Pieper
#73. Bourgeois do not even suspect that we serve them our hearts. The race of gladiators has not died: every artist is one. He amuses the public with his afflictions.
Gustave Flaubert
#74. This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
Edvard Munch
#75. For bourgeois classes as such have seldom before and never since displayed heroism. It was "the last of our heroisms", as Carlyle, not without reason, has said.
Max Weber
#76. The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
Theodor Adorno
#77. Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have
said.
Louise Bourgeois
#78. The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#79. The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.
Tony Tulathimutte
#80. When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I've always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It's a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it's not a pin.
Louise Bourgeois
#81. I never want to see umbrellas around me," he [Mussolini] once said. "The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope's soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.
David I. Kertzer
#82. I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me
a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
E. M. Forster
#83. Marx's scientific Messianism is itself of bourgeois origin. Progress, the future of science, the cult of technology and
of production, are bourgeois myths, which in the nineteenth century became dogma.
Albert Camus
#84. The academic is sharing in the bourgeois' loot, in a hundred little ways. And the peasant understands necessity as something that transcends mortality. To be in community with that peasant, the Chapel Hill academic will have to commit class suicide.
Stan Goff
#85. Mayakovsky, brazen poet of the revolution, sicced his jeering muses on gourmet fancies: Eat your pineapples, gobble your grouse Your last day is coming, you bourgeois louse!
Anya Von Bremzen
#86. When you're a kid, you always feel you have this weird kindred-spirit thing with other Jews, until you get older and you realize it's just middle-class bourgeois Jews that sort of fit a template that your family fits into one way or another.
Marc Maron
#87. To ameliorate & raise the standard of the workingmen to the bourgeois level, is perhaps to create a race of slaves content with their lot,-a cast of comfortable Pariahs.
Remy De Gourmont
#88. The two most potent post-war orthodoxies
socialist politics and modernist art
have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
Roger Scruton
#89. From now on the architects would take over as the high preists of this bourgeois city.
Colm Toibin
#90. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.
Karl Marx
#91. It is important to note that when Mary Magdalene and other women were chosen by Jesus to bring the important news to the men, the men did not believe the women. Today 2,000 years later men still don't believe women when they say "We are also chosen by Jesus to be leaders in the church.
Roy Bourgeois
#92. It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.
Louise Bourgeois
#93. One must accept the fact that others don't see what you do.
Louise Bourgeois
#94. Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.
Louis Kronenberger
#95. For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order.
Adolf Hitler
#96. It is not a lack of real affection that scares me away again and again from marriage. Is it a fear of the comfortable life, of nice furniture, of dishonor that I burden myself with, or even the fear of becoming a contented bourgeois.
Albert Einstein
#97. Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.
Roland Barthes
#98. When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.
Honore De Balzac
#100. Artists are born not made. There's nothing you can do for them.
Louise Bourgeois
