Daily Inspiration Quote by Alberto Giacometti

Giacometti’s line lands like a cigarette burn: crude, funny, and meant to sting the polite fictions that keep “respectability” intact. He flips the usual moral hierarchy by defining honesty as transparency about exchange. The prostitute, in this framing, isn’t romanticized; she’s used as a scalpel. She makes the transaction explicit. Everyone else - the bourgeois lover, the social climber, the patron, the dinner-party flirtation - hides the price inside manners, promises, and self-image.

The subtext is less about sex than about art and power. Giacometti lived in a world where desire and money constantly negotiated: models paid to stand for hours, patrons paying for aura, critics trading status for access, artists selling the story of “authenticity” while still needing rent money. His sculptures, all elongated vulnerability and scraped-down surfaces, often feel like they’re trying to strip the human figure of its costumes and alibis. This aphorism does something similar in language: it removes the veil and points to the invoice.

There’s also an aggressive, masculine cynicism in the posture - “honest girls” is bait, a provocation that borrows misogynistic vocabulary to make a broader complaint about hypocrisy. That ugliness is part of the intent: not to comfort but to expose. The joke works because it weaponizes a taboo comparison to accuse respectable society of being just as transactional, only better dressed.