I've never done well when I've been appreciated. I've done best when I'm targeted for death.
I know how to give the meaning of a word but not how to give the intention of a word.
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.
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.
Under examination by the camera, a human body becomes for its inhabitant a field of betrayal more than a ground of communication, and the camera's further power is manifested as it documents the individual's self-conscious efforts to control the body each time it is conscious of the camera's attention to it.
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.
God wanted man to know him somehow through his creatures, and since no creature could fittingly reflect the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied his creatures and gave a certain goodness and perfection to each of them so that from them we could judge the goodness and perfection of the Creator, who embraces infinite perfection in the perfection of his one and utterly simple essence.
(with trout) we are touching something unrestricted, wild and arcane, beyond the reach of those who carefully maintain one-dimensional lives. There is, I tell myself, someone in the city nearby whose one contact today with unreconstructed nature will be to step into a diminutive pile of poodle excrement
To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another.
Every success is built on the ability to do better than good enough. As you climb the ladder of success, be sure it's leaning against the right building. Eighty percent of success is showing up.