Daily Inspiration Quote by John Barrymore

Barrymore’s line lands like a champagne toast with a hangover baked in: it flatters desire while admitting the clock always wins. Coming from an actor whose public mythos fused matinee-idol magnetism with self-destruction, it isn’t just a jaunty complaint about abundance. It’s a performance of appetite as destiny, a way to turn restlessness into charm and inevitability.

The phrasing does a neat trick. “Trouble with life” pretends at philosophy, then swerves into libido. That bait-and-switch is the point: he frames romantic pursuit as a noble existential problem, not a series of choices. “So many” and “so little” set up a comedic imbalance, like a farce where the hero can’t keep up with the plot. Women become the aesthetic proof that life is worth chasing, but also the distraction that ensures he never arrives anywhere. There’s seduction in that self-presentation: the speaker is too alive, too sensitive to beauty, too doomed by time to be held to ordinary standards.

The subtext is less about women than about scarcity and status. Naming “beautiful women” signals access; he’s not lamenting loneliness, he’s lamenting surplus. In early Hollywood and Broadway celebrity culture, where charm was currency and scandal could be publicity, this kind of line polishes rakehood into sophistication. It invites the audience to laugh, admire, and excuse him in one breath, even as it reveals a darker truth: the insatiable man doesn’t fear missing out on love so much as missing out on himself.