A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.