Stanley Cavell > Quotes

“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, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage

“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, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays

“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 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

“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.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden

“(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, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage

“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

“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.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

“We do not see our hand in what happens, and so we call certain events melancholy accidents...”
― Stanley Cavell

“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.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden

“A photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves. But wanting to say that may well make us ontologically restless. ‘Photographs present us with things themselves’ sounds, and ought to sound, paradoxical … It is no less paradoxical or false to hold up a photograph of Garbo and say, ‘That is not Garbo,’ if all you mean is that the object you are holding up is not a human creature. Such troubles in notating so obvious a fact suggest that we do not know what a photograph is; we do not know how to place it ontologically. We might say that we don’t know how to think of the connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of.”
― Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition

“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.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden

“Of the events which keep burning on the Continent, the writer of Walden is apparently dismissive: “If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted” (II, 19). Marx, at about the same time, puts the point a little differently in his Eighteenth Brumaire, suggesting that it is only if you think like a newspaper that you will take the events of 1848 (or 1830) as front-page history; they belong on the theater page, or in the obituaries. But in Walden’s way of speaking, its remark also means that the French Revolution was not new. For example, the revolution we had here at home happened first, the one that began “two miles south” of where the writer is now sitting, on “our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground” (II, 10). For an American poet, placed in that historical locale, the American Revolution is more apt to constitute the absorbing epic event. Only it has two drawbacks: first, it is overshadowed by the epic event of America itself; second, America’s revolution never happened. The colonists fought a war against England all right, and they won it. But it was not a war of independence that was won, because we are not free; nor was even secession the outcome, because we have not departed from the conditions England lives under, either in our literature or in our political and economic lives.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition

“(Something has happened; it is up to us to name it, or not to. Something is wrestling us for our blessing.)”
― Stanley Cavell

“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.”
― Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare