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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.