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

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

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

Philosophy is the education of grown-ups.

- Stanley Cavell

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

- 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

One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch th…

- Stanley Cavell

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…

- Stanley Cavell