Bourgeois Quotes

• In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

  Karl Marx

  Independent, Individuality, Individualism

  BookCaps, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (2012). “The Communist Manifesto in Plain and Simple English”, p.61, BookCaps Study Guides

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• I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Interesting, Would Be, Needs

  "Louise Bourgeois: a web of emotions" by Adrian Searle, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2010.

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• An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Art, Memorable, Acceptance

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• To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

  Jules Renard

  Class, Horror

  Jules Renard, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Roget (2008). “The Journal of Jules Renard”, p.28, Tin House Books

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• I came from a family of repairers. 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

  Mad, Spiders, Bash

  "Louise Bourgeois: a web of emotions" by Adrian Searle, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2010.

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• At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering... To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread %u2013 sometimes it was still warm %u2013 I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture.

  Louise Bourgeois

  People, Sculpture, Lines

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• All freed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

  Karl Marx

  Real, Men, Air

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1968). “Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: selected works in one volume”

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• It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Inspirational, Motivation, Manage

  Roni Horn, Louise Bourgeois, Anne Carson, Hélène Cixous, John Waters (2004). “Wonderwater (Alice Offshore)”, Steidl Verlag

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• What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Art, Mean, Way

  Louise Bourgeois, Donald Burton Kuspit (1988). “Bourgeois”, Vintage

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• Sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation-and I like that.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Sometimes, Confrontation

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• I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Girl, Drawing, Parent

  "Louise Bourgeois: a web of emotions" by Adrian Searle, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2010.

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• The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Girl, Mother, Role Models

  "Louise Bourgeois: a web of emotions" by Adrian Searle, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2010.

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• I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Hands

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• My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Drama, Childhood, Magic

  Louise Bourgeois (1998). “Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997”

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• Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have
  said.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Art, Important, Guarantees

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• I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Drawing, Long, Diaries

  "Artist Louise Bourgeois reveals her thoughts on drawing". The Guardian interview, www.theguardian.com. September 18, 2009.

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• The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Philosophy, Men, Political

  Vladimir Il'ich Lenin (1975). “Izbrannye Proizvedenii͡a V Trekh Tomakh”

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• Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off.

  Allan Bloom

  Real, Men, Self

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.177, Simon and Schuster

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• If you're bourgeois, money is it. It's all the questions and all the answers. Ain't no E-flat or color blue, only $12.98 or $1,000. If it isn't money, it isn't nothing.

  John Coltrane

  Blue, Color, Answers

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• The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

  Tariq Ali

  Democracy, Oppression, Function

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• No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!

  Vladimir Lenin

  War, People, Enemy

  "How to Organise Competition?". "Collected Works" by Vladimir Lenin , Vol. 26, (pp. 411, 414), 1999.

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• I am not interested in deconsecrating: this is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Fashion, Hate, Want

  Oswald Stack, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1969). “Pasolini on Pasolini: interviews with Oswald Stack”

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• 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

  Party, Discipline, Democracy

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• Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

  Karl Jaspers

  Demand, World, Existential

  Karl Jaspers (1997). “Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity”, p.60, JHU Press

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• As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

  Henry Adams

  Class, America, Boredom

  Henry Adams, Jacob Clavner Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee (1982). “The Letters of Henry Adams”, p.200, Harvard University Press

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