Cecil Beaton Quotes

• 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

  64 Copy quote

• Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

  Cecil Beaton

  Boredom, World, Firsts

  28 Copy quote

• All I want is the best of everything and there's very little of that left.

  Cecil Beaton

  Want, Littles, Left

  "The Style Behind The Camera". www.esquire.com. September 2, 2016.

  15 Copy quote

• You can't teach people photography, they've got to learn how to do it the best way possible for them. They can learn from looking at pictures taken by well-known people, but they don't really get intimate with the medium until they've made a few bad shots!

  Cecil Beaton

  Photography, Taken, People

  13 Copy quote

• Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.

  Cecil Beaton

  Intelligent, Conceit, Enthusiastic

  Cecil Beaton (1957). “The Face of the World: An International Scrapbook of People and Places”

  13 Copy quote

• Love is someone you can be silly with

  Cecil Beaton

  Love, Family, Happiness

  9 Copy quote

• A technical failure that shows some attempt at aesthetic expression is of infinitely more value than uninspired success.

  Cecil Beaton

  Expression, Aesthetic, Shows

  4 Copy quote

• The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.

  Cecil Beaton

  Fashion, Style, Fashionable

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Cecil Beaton (1957). “The Face of the World: An International Scrapbook of People and Places”

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  91 Copy quote

• What is elegance? Soap and water!

  Cecil Beaton

  Water, Soap And Water, Soap

  9 Copy quote

• [He stared into the camera] like some sort of an animal gazing from across the back of its sty. (On Winston Churchill)

  Cecil Beaton

  Animal, Cameras, Gazing

  7 Copy quote

• I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the lipstick off their teeth.

  Cecil Beaton

  Teeth, Want, Photograph

  7 Copy quote

• I can't afford a whole new set of enemies.

  Cecil Beaton

  Enemy, Whole, I Can

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

• 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, Airline Business

  Cecil Beaton (1955). “I take great pleasure”

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Cecil Beaton (1955). “I take great pleasure”

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  24 Copy quote

• San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities

  Cecil Beaton

  Cities, San Francisco, Bay Area

  8 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Richard Avedon

Irving Penn

David Bailey

Norman Parkinson

Edward Steichen

Erwin Blumenfeld

Diana Vreeland

Man Ray