12 Quotes by 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 question.)

On Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday:"These two simply appreciate one another more than either of them appreciates anyone else, and they would rather be appreciated by one another more than by anyone else. They just are at home with one another, whether or not they can ever live together under the same roof -- that is, ever find a roof they can live together under.

We do not see our hand in what happens, and so we call certain events melancholy accidents...

Philosophy is the education of grown-ups.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.