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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Philosophy is the education of grown-ups.