Daily Inspiration Quote by Cecil Beaton

“All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left” lands like a perfectly angled insult: aimed partly at the world, partly at the speaker. Cecil Beaton, the society photographer who made glamour look inevitable, builds the line on a delicious contradiction. “All I want” pretends to be modest, almost childlike. Then “the best of everything” detonates that pretense. It’s aspiration so absolute it becomes comic - and then, with the turn, mournful.

The bite is in the second clause. “There’s very little of that left” isn’t just snobbery about declining standards; it’s an elegy for an ecosystem that once produced “the best” as a shared fantasy. Beaton spent his career manufacturing an idea of excellence - in light, pose, fabric, manners - and selling it back to an audience hungry for hierarchy. When he suggests the supply has run out, he’s admitting something sharper: that “best” was never a stable category. It depended on a social order (aristocracy, high culture gatekeepers, the old editorial machine) that mid-century modernity steadily hollowed out.

The intent reads as self-mythmaking. Beaton casts himself as the last connoisseur, stranded in a world of substitutes. The subtext is insecurity: if taste is your identity, democratization feels like personal erasure. It’s funny because it’s extreme; it stings because it’s true to a certain kind of cultural exhaustion - the moment when refinement stops looking like virtue and starts looking like a relic someone is still polishing out of habit.