Quotes About Bourgeois

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society.

The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure. He alone loves who has the strength to hold fast to love.

The end of the family paralyses the forces of opposition. The rising collectivist order is a mockery of a classless one: together with the bourgeois it liquidates the Utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love.

What does it really matter?' is a line we like to associate with bourgeois callousness, but it is the line most likely to make the individual aware, without dread, of the insignificance of his existence. The inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one's distance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human part, the very part resisted by its ideologists.

Many of the rioters were obviously bourgeois, the scions of privileged families, as have been the leaders of so many destructive movements in modern history. That same evening, I dined in an expensive restaurant and saw there a fellow diner whom I had observed a few hours before joyfully heaving a brick through a window. How much destruction did he think his country could bear before his own life might be affected, his own existence compromised?

It is the prerogative of the unthinkingly prosperous to sneer at the bourgeois virtues.

The only thing worse than having a family, I discovered, is not having a family. My rejection of bourgeois virtues as mean-spirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent; and a rejection of everything associated with one's childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it.

Flea markets are also now legal in Cuba, and a petty trade in cast-off clothing and household goods takes place. Twelve years ago it was unthinkable for anyone to buy or sell anything in the open, for buying and selling were symptoms of bourgeois individualism and contrary to Fidel's socialist vision, in which everything is to be rationed—rationally, as it were—according to need. (In practice, of course, this meant rationing according to what there was, which was not much.)

And accordingly, the adolescent sensibility is one that prevails in much of the art world, where the most adolescent of goals, transgression, is still aimed at. Shock the parents, épater le bourgeois, such is the golden rule.

During the eighties and nineties, people wanted to be chic, elegant, bourgeois.

He accused her of being bourgeois, whatever that was—it seemed to involve engagement rings and babies and all sorts of things she wasn't interested in. He got so heated about them that for a moment she thought he might actually be proposing, in an angry, cack-handed fashion.

The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters.

The split in his social existence made itself felt in his personality structure as well. Mozart's entire musical activity, his whole training as a virtuoso performer and composer, were shaped by the music canon of the hegemonic court societies of Europe. [...] At the same time, in his personality structure, especially as far as his social relations were concerned, he remained a man of the petty bourgeois ...

it took me a long time to realize that she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark.

Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

'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.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

I mean, I'm married to an academic oncologist, a cancer doctor, okay? He and his colleagues are some of the most conscientious, devoted, hard-working, conventional bourgeois people in the known universe. They are the people that keep this society going.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Bolshevism, it seems to me,' said Charlie, 'is just a superlative hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is, isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man without them.

Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the great thing, the Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many different, and equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate… hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.

From being a romantic youth who fancied himself a footloose bohemian he had settled, with but a few stabs at ironic detachment, into a bourgeois life with a doting hausfrau and a richly wallpapered home filled with heavy Biedermeier furniture. He was no longer restless. He was comfortable.