All 50 Uses
bourgeois
in
The Magic Mountain
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- There were counteracting and corrective psychic factors, wholesome and ordering instincts—one might almost call them bourgeois—under whose compensating and modifying effects perverse components were fused to a consistent and useful whole; and this was, all in all, a common and welcome process, whose consequences, however (as Dr. Krokowski rather superciliously remarked), were of no importance to the physician or thinker.†
Chpt 4.6bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits
- In such a case, to be precise, the two clusters of forces, both those of the love instinct and the impulses hostile to it, among which shame and disgust were to be noted in particular, exhibited tensions and passions that exceeded all normal bourgeois bounds; and the ensuing battle between these two forces, which was now carried out in the depths of the soul, prevented wayward instincts from being restrained, steadied, and civilized in the manner necessary for a normal, harmonious, and appropriate love life.†
Chpt 4.6
- Hans Castorp grimaced, but his eyes remained fixed on Madame Chauchat's hand, and a vague, halfhearted recollection passed through his mind of something Dr. Krokowski had said about corrective bourgeois forces that counteracted love.... But this arm was more beautiful, this arm bent gently behind the head—and was barely clad, because the fabric of the sleeve was thinner than that of the blouse, the flimsiest gossamer, which lent the arm just a hint of delicate illusion, making it even prettier than it probably would have been without any covering.†
Chpt 4.6
- There could be no question whatever of any counteracting bourgeois forces.†
Chpt 4.6 *
- Or she finds it rather bourgeois to wear a wedding ring, just a plain gold band—all she'd need then is a little basket for her keys.†
Chpt 4.8
- But that day would come, Settembrini said, smiling delicately beneath his moustache—it would come, if not on the feet of doves, then on the pinions of eagles, and would burst as the dawn of universal brotherhood under the emblem of reason, science, and justice; it would bring about a new Holy Alliance of bourgeois democracies, the shining antithesis of that thrice-infamous alliance of princes and ministers whom Grandfather Giuseppe had declared his personal enemies—in a word, the Republic of the World.†
Chpt 4.9
- Two rooms furnished in banal bourgeois style, one opening into the other and separated only by portieres, looked toward the valley: a dining room done in "antique German"; a combination living room and office, with sofa and chairs, bookcases and heavy wool carpets, a fraternity cap and crossed swords hung above a desk, plus a small smoking alcove, done in "Turkish" style.†
Chpt 5.6
- But it's true, you are all a little bourgeois.†
Chpt 5.9
- What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order—that's the point!†
Chpt 5.9
- But he is not a bourgeois, he is a military man.†
Chpt 5.9
- A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet—behold, Germany all rolled into one, just as it should be!†
Chpt 5.9
- That form of address, as cultivated in the West and in civilized society, seems terribly bourgeois and pedantic to me.†
Chpt 5.9
- "My little bourgeois!" she said.†
Chpt 5.9
- My handsome bourgeois with the little moist spot.†
Chpt 5.9
- And if in the course of both conversations, recorded and unrecorded, the genius of the place had called him, Hans Castorp, a "joli bourgeois tut petit endroit humide"—in its way, a translation of Settembrini's phrase "problem child of life"—the question then was: which part of this mixed character would prove the stronger, the bourgeois or the other?†
Chpt 6.1
- And if in the course of both conversations, recorded and unrecorded, the genius of the place had called him, Hans Castorp, a "joli bourgeois tut petit endroit humide"—in its way, a translation of Settembrini's phrase "problem child of life"—the question then was: which part of this mixed character would prove the stronger, the bourgeois or the other?†
Chpt 6.1
- Had his notion that they ought to write one another not been very bourgeois, very pedantic—particularly when all along he had felt it was unnecessary, even undesirable for them to speak to one another?†
Chpt 6.1
- Possibly that does not suffice to make it 'worth discussing from an intellectual standpoint,' but it does remove them to a sphere beyond the ken of any bourgeois affirmation of life.†
Chpt 6.2
- "What you like to call the 'bourgeois affirmation of life,' " Herr Settembrini replied—setting the corners of his mouth in a taut line under the sweep of his moustache, so that only the front of his lips moved, and screwing his neck up out of his collar at an odd backward slant— "will always be found ready to advocate ideals of reason and morality and to impress them on young, wavering minds by whatever means available."†
Chpt 6.2
- A bourgeois court of arbitration that decides questions of life and death, ascertains God's will, and ordains the course of history.†
Chpt 6.2
- Bourgeois civilization—†
Chpt 6.2
- Nonsense, the bourgeoisie doesn't know what it wants.†
Chpt 6.2bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class
- Our Master of the Lodge"—he pointed at Settembrini—"may wish to claim that all pedagogic proclivities, even the very calling itself, belong to bourgeois humanism—but one must take issue with him there.†
Chpt 6.2bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits
- I don't know who ought to like that more—Settembrini with his bourgeois world republic, or Naphta with his hierarchical cosmopolitanism.†
Chpt 6.2
- And as for the degradation of man, its history coincides exactly with the rise of the bourgeois spirit.†
Chpt 6.3
- If need be, I can do without your counterarguments—I am quite familiar with the political ideology of the bourgeoisie.†
Chpt 6.3bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class
- In the modern confrontation with bourgeois-capitalist rot, the world's proletariat embodies the humanity and criteria of the City of God.†
Chpt 6.3bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits
- Asceticism was even his basis for reproaching the humanist whenever he trumpeted peace and happiness; Naphta would belligerently accuse him to his face of love of the flesh (amor carnalis) and love of physical comfort {commodorum corporis), call it utter bourgeois irreligion to ascribe the least value to life and health.†
Chpt 6.6
- During the centuries he was talking about, Naphta responded, such decent bourgeois measures would have served neither side—would have been of no more use to the ill and suffering than to the healthy and happy, who had wanted to demonstrate their charity not so much out of compassion as out of the desire to save their own souls.†
Chpt 6.6
- And as for pedagogics, the conception of human dignity that sought to ban corporal punishment had its roots, to hear Naphta tell it, in the liberal individualism of the era of bourgeois humanism, in the Enlightenment's absolutism of the ego, which was about to atrophy and be replaced by a wave of newer, less namby-pamby social concepts, ideas of submission and obedience, of bridles and bonds, and since such things were not to be had without holy cruelty, flogging would thus be regarded with quite a different eye.†
Chpt 6.6
- He ridiculed the philanthropist's reluctance to shed blood, his reverence for life, claimed that such a reverence for life belonged to only the most banal rubbers-and-umbrellas bourgeois periods, but that the moment history took a more passionate turn, the moment a single idea, something that transcended mere "security," was at work, something suprapersonal, something greater man the individual—and since that alone was a suite worthy of mankind, it was, on a higher plane, the normal state of affairs—at that moment, then, individual life would always be sacrificed without further ado to that higher idea, and not only that, but individuals would also unhesitatingly and gladly risk their own li†
Chpt 6.6
- All such matters were not only foreign and of no significance to religion as such, but also inimical to it; for they were the constituents of life, or so-called health, which was to say, ultraphilistine, utter bourgeois existence—to which the religious world was ordained to be the absolute opposite, indeed the very genius of opposition.†
Chpt 6.6
- In caustic words, Naphta forbade Herr Settembrini to call himself an "individualist," because he denied the polarity of God and nature and defined the question of humanity, the problem of man's interior conflict, as simply the conflict between the individual and larger social units, and so was wedded to a bourgeois morality that was tied to life, understood life as an end in itself, saw its sole purpose in unheroic utility, and viewed all moral law as invested in the state;†
Chpt 6.6
- What constituted man's true state and condition: obliteration in all-devouring, all-leveling community, which was a simultaneously voluptuous and ascetic act; or "critical subjectivity," where bombast and strict bourgeois virtue were at loggerheads?†
Chpt 6.6
- And whereas Settembrini had spoken behind Naphta's back in tones of pathos-laden admonition about the Jesuit, as if he were somehow diabolic, Naphta made unperturbed fun of the other man and the sphere he came from, suggesting that the whole thing was terribly old-fashioned and backward, an attempt at bourgeois enlightenment perpetrated by yesterday's freethinkers, when in fact it was nothing more than a wretched intellectual mirage, which its self-deluded adherents ludicrously believed was full of revolutionary life.†
Chpt 6.8
- From him he got his charcoal-burner's faith in reason, freedom, human progress, and the whole moth-eaten classicistic-bourgeois ideology of virtue.†
Chpt 6.8
- I assume that the rituals of the lodges have gone through a rather pathetic adjustment to the more prosaic spirit of the modern bourgeoisie.†
Chpt 6.8bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class
- You'll have to ask him that yourself, but I fear you won't find him very talkative, because even if it was all done in a more bourgeois fashion, he was nevertheless sworn to silence.†
Chpt 6.8bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits
- In a word, it is bourgeois misery organized as a club.†
Chpt 6.8
- Education and property—behold the bourgeoisie!†
Chpt 6.8bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class
- And as for the rest of his charge, Herr Lodovico could be sure that he, Naphta, pursued his modicum of bourgeois activity, to which the former had been kind enough to allude, with all due reservatio mentalis and that he recognized a certain irony in having found a niche in an educational institution devoted to classical rhetoric, a pedagogy whose life span even the most sanguine would estimate only in decades.†
Chpt 6.8bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits
- For without education you cannot prevail before humanity, and there is only one kind of education—you call it bourgeois, but in fact it is human.†
Chpt 6.8
- A matter that the Italian evidently preferred to take for granted would be the next item on that agenda: whether the classical tradition of the Mediterranean was intended for all humanity, and therefore eternal in human terms, or whether it had not merely been the intellectual fashion and trimmings of one particular epoch, the bourgeois liberal age, which could then die with it.†
Chpt 6.8
- They all felt it—most bitterly, of course, the gentleman in question, who twirled his sweeping moustaches while he searched for a counterblow, giving his foe time to engage in further attacks against classical models, against the rhetorical literary tradition of European education and schooling, with its mania for grammatical form, which only served the interests of bourgeois class domination and had long since become an object of ridicule among the masses.†
Chpt 6.8
- Yes, these gentlemen had no idea what a huge joke all our doctor degrees, our whole mandarin educational system, was to the masses, how they ridiculed our public grammar schools, that instrument of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, maintained under the delusion that by watering down scholarship one educated the commonfolk.†
Chpt 6.8bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class
- The masses had long since learned that for the education and discipline needed in the battle against the decaying bourgeoisie they should look elsewhere than to coercive schools imposed by the authorities; and by now every idiot knew that the school system developed from the cloisters of the Middle Ages was as anachronistic and absurd as a periwig, that no one owed his real education to schools anymore, and that free, open instruction by public lectures, exhibitions, films, and so forth was far superior to that found in any schoolroom.†
Chpt 6.8
- whereas the literary man, that true son of humanism and the bourgeoisie, who could read and write—which nobles, warriors, and common people could do only poorly or not at all—could do nothing else, understood absolutely nothing about the world, and remained a Latin windbag, a master of speech, who left real life to honest folk, which was why he had also turned politics into a bag of wind, full of rhetoric and beautiful literature, called radicalism and democracy in party jargon, and so on and so forth.†
Chpt 6.8
- And it was precisely there that Herr Settembrini revealed himself for what he truly was, the man of progress, of liberalism, of bourgeois revolution.†
Chpt 6.8bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits
- For progress was pure nihilism, and the liberal bourgeois was in truth a man of nothingness and the Devil—yes, he denied God, the conservative, positive Absolute, and instead pledged allegiance to the devilish Anti-Absolute, and in his deadly pacifism marveled at how devout he was.†
Chpt 6.8
- This outfit set the human grandeur of that head in strong relief against the pillow, in part lending it a less bourgeois, more working-class look, in part suggesting a sculptured, immortalized bust.†
Chpt 7.4
Definitions:
-
(1)
(bourgeois) typical of the middle class or their values and habits - typically used disapprovingly
or (in Marxist theory):
typical of the property-owning classBourgeois is often used to refer to the values of the upper middle class. You may also see the term petit bourgeois to describe very small business owners.
Note that bourgeois, bourgeoisie, and bourgeoise are often interchanged.
Bourgeois is most common and can be used as an adjective or a noun. Bourgeoisie is typically used only as a noun, and bourgeoise is occasionally used as an alternate spelling of bourgeois. - (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)