Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Bernard

Dignity is supposed to be earned in motion: work, restraint, self-command. Jeffrey Bernard flips that piety on its head with the blithe confidence of a man who knows the sermon and has stopped believing in it. The line is funny because it’s upholstered in excess - “lying about all day,” “waited on by servants,” “bloody champagne” - then delivered as if he’s defending a modest lifestyle choice. The humor isn’t in the luxury; it’s in the moral bookkeeping. Bernard treats indulgence as a point of principle, daring you to call it shameful and, in doing so, exposing how arbitrary our respectability codes can be.

The subtext is classic Bernard: a performance of dissipation as honesty. He isn’t really arguing that decadence is noble; he’s puncturing the notion that austerity automatically confers virtue. By insisting there’s “nothing undignified” here, he telegraphs awareness that society does, in fact, find it undignified - unless the right people are doing it, in which case it becomes “leisure” or “taste.” The servants matter because they reveal the class machinery behind elegance, the unseen labor that turns idleness into a lifestyle.

Context helps: Bernard, a hard-drinking British columnist associated with Soho’s boozy, self-mythologizing scene, made a career out of turning self-ruin into copy and charm. “Bloody champagne” lands as both punchline and diagnosis - champagne as aspiration, “bloody” as hangover, violence, or sheer British emphasis. It’s a one-sentence manifesto for the anti-hero intellectual: witty, compromised, and allergic to sanctimony.