Stanley Cavell Quotes

#1. (Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.)

Stanley Cavell

#2. One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.

Stanley Cavell

#3. I know how to give the meaning of a word but not how to give the intention of a word.

Stanley Cavell

#4. The academic world doesn't invite you to try to walk on two feet all the time. And in philosophy especially ... it's a very intimidating place. The intimidation can be very thin, or it can stop you.

Stanley Cavell

#5. Philosophy is the education of grown-ups.

Stanley Cavell

#6. A camera is an opening in a box: that is the best emblem of the fact that a camera holding an object is holding the rest of the world away. The camera has been praised for extending the senses; it may, as the world goes, deserve more praise for confining them, leaving room for thought.

Stanley Cavell

#7. I try to keep my voice in writing, and I think that's why I get so many complaints about how I write.

Stanley Cavell

#8. The achievement of happiness requires not the ... satisfaction of our needs ... but the examination and transformation of those needs.

Stanley Cavell

#9. The development of fast film allowed the subjects of our photographs to be caught unawares, beyond our or their control. But they are nevertheless caught; the camera holds the last lanyard of control we would forgo.

Stanley Cavell

#10. I don't run away from the idea of philosophy as seductive. I want the sentences to be prose but intense prose, to show that, like life, thinking is not linear.

Stanley Cavell

#11. I remain too impressed with Freud's vision of the human animal's compromise with existence
the defense or deflection of our ego in knowledge of ourselves from what there is to know about ourselves
to suppose that a human life can get itself without residue into the clear.

Stanley Cavell