A Quote by Stanley Cavell

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.

Stanley Cavell

Quote Topics

Birdie Command Direction Essentially Extend Immediate Impulse Photographer Photography Stage Subjects Visible Watch

Quote Author

Stanley Cavell
American - Philosopher
Born: September 1, 1926

There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.

Garet Garrett

If you have an impulse, not if you're going to ruin someone elses' scene, if you have an impulse of a funny little add-on or taking something in a weird direction, try it.

Rachel Dratch

Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this: always obey such an impulse.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.

August Wilson

The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.

L. Ron Hubbard

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

H. L. Mencken

If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something and if it ain't - take two!

Jack Nicholson

It's not that bullying is any worse today. The impulse for cruelty is the same impulse. The only difference is that the tools to achieve that have become more sophisticated.

Jodee Blanco

The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.

Joseph Wood Krutch

De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.

Saul Bellow

Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.

Richard M. Weaver

I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.

Fran Lebowitz

To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.

Eva Zeisel

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

Brooks Atkinson

Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.