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

- Stanley Cavell

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 fu…

- Stanley Cavell

Philosophy... is indeed outrageous, inherently so. It seeks to disquiet the foundations of our lives and to offer us in recompense nothing better tha…

- Stanley Cavell

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 q…

- Stanley Cavell

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

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

- Stanley Cavell

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…

- Stanley Cavell

The development of fast film allowed the subjects of our photographs to be caught unawares, beyond our or their control. But they are nevertheless ca…

- Stanley Cavell

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 n…

- Stanley Cavell