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Stanley Cavell Quotes

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

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

Stanley Cavell
Happiness, Achievement, Examination
"Pursuits of Happiness". Book by Stanley Cavell, 1981.

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

Stanley Cavell
Giving, Intention, Know How
"The Division of Talent". Critical Inquiry, 11, No. 4, June 1985.

Under examination by the camera, a human body becomes for its inhabitant a field of betrayal more than a ground of communication, and the camera's further power is manifested as it documents the individual's self-conscious efforts to control the body each time it is conscious of the camera's attention to it.

Stanley Cavell
Betrayal, Communication, Self
Stanley Cavell (2005). “Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life”, p.199, Harvard University Press

Philosophy... is indeed outrageous, inherently so. It seeks to disquiet the foundations of our lives and to offer us in recompense nothing better than itself- and this on the basis of no expert knowledge, of nothing closed to the ordinary human being, once... [one] lets himself or herself be informed by the process and ambition of philosophy.

Stanley Cavell
Philosophy, Ambition, Foundation

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
Sadness, Answers, Facts
Stanley Cavell (1981). “Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage”, p.259, Harvard University Press

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
Running, Philosophy, Thinking
Source: www.bookforum.com

So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but a human wish, intensifying since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation - a wish for power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another... Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction.

Stanley Cavell
Photography, Long, Wish

Philosophy is the education of grown-ups.

Stanley Cavell
Philosophy
Source: www.believermag.com

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
Photography, Watches, Photographer
Stanley Cavell (1979). “The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film”, p.90, Harvard University Press

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
Philosophy, Two, Feet
Source: www.bookforum.com

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
Writing, Thinking, Voice
Source: www.bookforum.com

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
Development, Lasts, Cameras
Stanley Cavell (1979). “The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film”

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