Cavell Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates. — Abbott Lawrence Lowell

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

(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

Death, so caused, may be mysterious, but what founds these lives is clear enough: the capacity to love, the strength to found a life upon a love. That the love becomes incompatible with that life is tragic, but that it is maintained until the end is heroic. People capable of such love could have removed mountains; instead it has caved in upon them. One moral of such events is obvious: if you would avoid tragedy, avoid love; if you cannot avoid love, avoid integrity; if you cannot avoid integrity, avoid the world; if you cannot avoid the world, destroy it. — Stanley Cavell

There is not one single established religion that an intelligent, educated man can believe. — George Bernard Shaw

The drudgery of being a professional writer comes in trying to make good days out of bad days and in squeezing out the words when they won't just flow. — Benjamin Cavell

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. — Stanley Cavell

Zeus needed someone to blame, so of course he'd picked the handsomest, most talented, most popular god in the pantheon: me. — Rick Riordan

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

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

Some guys just slip under the radar. — Victor Cruz

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

Philosophy is the education of grown-ups. — Stanley Cavell

Someday, somehow, I am going to do something useful, something for people. They are, most of them, so helpless, so hurt and so unhappy. — Edith Cavell

This is all that "ordinary" in the phrase "ordinary language philosophy" means, or ought to mean. It does not refer to particular words of wide use, nor to particular sorts of men. It reminds us that whatever words are said and meant are said and meant by particular men, and that to understand what they (the words) mean you must understand what they (whoever is using them) means, and that sometimes men, do not see what they mean, that usually they cannot say what they mean, that for various reasons they may not know what they mean, and that when they are forced to recognize this they feel they do not, and perhaps cannot, mean anything, and they are struck dumb. — Stanley Cavell

A real relationship's based on trust and understanding, the sharing of little things. Moments of happiness and laughter. Realising you've both just had the same thought, or were about to say the same thing. — Peter May

Silence, indifference and inaction were Hitler's principal allies. — Immanuel Jakobovits, Baron Jakobovits

I can't stop while there are lives to be saved. — Edith 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 not linear. — Stanley Cavell

Making choices for the feelings they bring us & not what others think means we can find fulfilment and achievement from fulfilling our goals.
From the writers of Carolann's Pathway and Carolann's Progression, The Gateway to Understanding your Life's Ultimate Journey — Roland Bush-Cavell And Carolann Frankie

Standing, as I do, in view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone (On the eve of her execution) — Edith Cavell

Nothing but physical impossibility, lack of space and money would make me close my doors to Allied refugees. — Edith Cavell

When I felt like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set. — Steven Spielberg

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

I have no fear nor shrinking; I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me. — Edith Cavell

Most influential of all is the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and a younger generation of philosophers who have attempted to follow his pioneering work in thinking about literature philosophically. — Philip Kitcher

I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone. — Edith Cavell

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

Pynchon has been a favorite writer and a major influence all along. In many ways I see him as almost the start of a certain mutant pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of mine, and I suspect that if you talk with a lot of recent SF writers you'll find they've all read Gravity's Rainbow (1973) several times and have been very much influenced by it. I was into Pynchon early on- I remember seeing a New York Times review of V. when it first came out- I was just a kid- and thinking, Boy, that sounds like some really weird shit! — William Gibson

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

She became fascinated by the statue of Edith Cavell and would stand at the base of it in the freezing cold of a December morning, looking up: -
Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone-. Sometimes those words made her cry. The tears would come uncontrollably and they would not stop. And in those moments Anna found forgiveness and it made her free. But they were only moments. Forgiveness is a hard thing to hang on to. — Miranda Emmerson

Patriotism alone is not enough. — Edith Cavell

The violence of either grief or joy, their own enactures with themselves destroy. — William Shakespeare