Cecil Beaton famous quotes

07-16-2025

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Boredom #World #Firsts
What is elegance? Soap and water!
-- Cecil Beaton

#Water #Soap #Elegance
The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Fashion #Style #Fashionable
After twenty annual visits, I am still surprised each time I return to see this giant asparagus bed of alabaster and rose and green skyscrapers.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Rose #Bed #Twenties
On close inspection, this device turned out to be a funereal juke box - the result of mixing Lloyd's of London with the principle of the chewing gum dispenser.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Mixing #Principles #Gum
I can't afford a whole new set of enemies.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Enemy
Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Intelligent #Conceit #Enthusiastic
San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities
-- Cecil Beaton

#Cities #San Francisco
I have the worst ear for criticism, even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle, who says she doesn't like blue.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Blue #Circles #Criticism
All I want is the best of everything and there's very little of that left.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Want #Littles
Miss Marilyn Monroe calls to mind the bouquet of a fireworks display, eliciting from her awed spectators an open-mouthed chorus of ohs and ahs ...
-- Cecil Beaton

#Missing #Mind #Bouquets
Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Fashion #Style #Needs
Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means... airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Mean #Reality #Perspective
More varied than any landscape was the landscape in the sky, with islands of gold and silver, peninsulas of apricot and rose against a background of many shades of turquoise and azure.
-- Cecil Beaton

#Islands #Sky #Rose
Love is someone you can be silly with
-- Cecil Beaton

#Love #Family #Happiness

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