Quotes from Stanley Cavell

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

We do not see our hand in what happens, so we call certain events melancholy accidents when they are the inevitabilities of our projects, and we call other events necessities merely because we will not change our minds.

What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets me.

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

What we know as self-consciousness is only our opinion of ourselves, and like any other opinion it comes from outside; it is hearsay, our contribution to public opinion. We must become disobedient to it, resist it, no longer listen to it.

What we call the Protestant Ethic, the use of worldly loss and gain to symbolize heavenly standing, appears in Walden as some last suffocation of the soul. America and its Christianity have become perfect, dreamlike liberalizations or parodies of themselves.

Appropriating" seems to have the same stress put on it in relating the individual to the world through the ownership of property as "belief has in relating the individual to the world through the acquisition and power of knowledge.

Philosophy is the education of grown-ups.