Something Repulsive

"In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive."
—Salvador Dali, quoted in Exposure, October 1990

A Vermilioned Nothingness

"It is the human that is the alien
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are distantly a part."

—Wallace Stevens

Balance

"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all."
—Carl Sagan, "The Burden of Skepticism," Pasadena Lecture, 1987

Fraud

“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”
—Jean-Luc Godard

The Other Mysteries

"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time—life and death—stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out."
—Richard Feynman, Quoted in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?, (edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown), 1988

Low Self-Esteem

"You got low self-esteem baby, you're a fantastic fuck."
—Showgirls, 1995