Top 50 Bourgeois Quotes

I remember my father, who was ‘somebody’ in the synagogue, bringing home with him one of the poor men who waited outside to be chosen to share the Passover meal. These patriarchal manners I remember well, although there was about them an air of bourgeois benevolence which was somewhat comic.

My mum, she has a very specific way of mixing bourgeois and hippie. She doesn’t wear a lot of make-up, but she always has to wear glasses, and she has this huge collection of glasses. And no rules.

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.

If a Labour movement, on a bourgeois basis, has hitherto existed in the country where the new movement is awakening it will certainly not disappear all at once.

Will you tell me, ‘Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well’? Can he, indeed? … Can you, sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.

I think that, often, actors represent what they’re not. You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic – they’re lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common.

Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.

The intellectual bourgeois of the old Empire – tepid and unimaginative, mentally slow, arrogant, and incorrectly trained – has proven his incapacity to be the bearer of German culture. His benumbed world is now toppled, its spirit is overthrown, and is in the midst of being recast into a new mold.

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.

I come from a petit bourgeois family, and I’ve always been drawn to artists and people who choose their own way of life instead of being chosen by the lives that people want for them.

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism.

I’m a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I’m old-fashioned, bourgeois.

Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they’ve got worse.

And ‘Queer Eye’ is fascinating. It has a pinch-me-I’m-dreaming quality. It’s very bourgeois, of course, and much more about the liberation of the consumer than the liberation of the democratic citizen.

I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.

The bourgeois are other people.

In Latin America, cinema has always been a bourgeois activity, I guess, as it is everywhere. It’s just a stupidly expensive art form, and there is nothing you can do about it.

In Italy, the Milanese are well organized but follow bourgeois taste. They adhere to certain codes of elegance, but not to individualism.

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.

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

The publication of the third volume of Capital has made hardly any impression upon bourgeois economic science.

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It’s a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.

Once you live in New York, you can’t live anywhere else. Living in Paris is like going in slow motion. It’s so bourgeois. I get so bored.

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

Progressives make money and spend money on businesses that meet needs instead of kill people! The future is in meeting needs – unto the bourgeois business of cleaning the drapes! – not spewing death and destruction with kickbacks.

In a higher phase of communist society… only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

There is no such thing as pure art. It’s a bourgeois conceit.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

Marx and Engels never talked about murdering the bourgeois. According to the old bourgeois concept, the judges were the ones who judged, and the executioners were the ones who executed.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

‘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.

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.

I remember going to one party of this preppy, bourgeois crowd, and there was some obnoxious character there, really bad news, and saying, ‘Oh my God, so the caricature you always see in films actually exists.’

I think at its most mature, love is a very bourgeois state. There is something about luxuriating in the nest of love that people fall into naturally.

That punk approach of ‘We don’t wanna get big’ is really a bourgeois thing. It’s not a tactic of people that actually have been successful at changing things.

The bourgeois woman not only demands her own bread, but she also requests spiritual nourishment and wants to develop her individuality.

With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career.

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.

For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

The public needs art – and it is the responsibility of a ‘self-proclaimed artist’ to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.

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

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

Capitalism and power politics have made our generation creatively sluggish, and our vital art is mired in a broad bourgeois philistinism.

In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.

If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn’t be an actor. You’re in the wrong profession.

Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighborhood in New York.