- Devoto Marotta: It's very difficult to see, because it's the last thing you learn.
- Parthenope: When do you learn to see?
- Devoto Marotta: When everything else begins to be missing.
- Parthenope: What is everything else?
- Devoto Marotta: Love, youth, desire, emotion, pleasure.
- Devoto Marotta: 'A professor just needs to be one class ahead of the students.'--Billy Wilder, an anthropologist.
- Devoto Marotta: We have to go easy with judgments cut with an axe, because, sooner or later, someone takes the axe and throws it at our heads.
- Bishop: It's dizzying. God is limited, he didn't entertain us kids enough. God only committed himself when he invented happy childhood, where everything was gentle purity. Then he got distracted, he let himself go, so the world we knew as children, suddenly and without warning, was exhausted. The worlds. The worlds are getting tired.
- Bishop: It's Catholicism. Freedom doesn't pass through doors.
- Parthenope: Where does it pass through?
- Bishop: It doesn't pass through.
- Flora Malva: Never display your photos. Even beauty, don't count on it. It charms for the first ten minutes and irritates for the next ten years.
- Parthenope: Giuliano, 'Culture is a set of spiritual and material values, that respond to the sum of existential problems, that, starting from the acquisition of food, reach the creations of art.'
- Greta Cool: You see, the problem is not that this statue is ugly. The problem is you Neapolitans. You are depressed and you don't know it. You walk arm in arm with horror and you don't know it. You are just sloppy and folkloristic. Everyone laughs at you and you don't realize it. You boast of being clever. But what have you gained from all this cleverness? You are poor, cowardly, whiny, backward. You steal and act badly. You are always ready to throw the cross on someone else. The invader of the moment, the corrupt politician, the unscrupulous property developer. But the disgrace is you. You are a people of wretches and you boast of being so. You will never make it. Dear horrible Neapolitans, I'm going back to the North, where the beautiful silence reigns, since I haven't been Neapolitan for many years. I was saved, but you weren't. You are dead.
- Bishop: Christ loves too much and is bent by his own love. Love is like that, it is not manageable, that's why from Jesus to singer-songwriters, they all try to tell us how to get over it. Do you love too much or too little? That's the whole difference.
- Flora Malva: Why do you want to be an actress?
- Parthenope: In old movies, actors always have a ready answer.
- Flora Malva: It's true. Life should be like this. Instead, we don't sleep at night. We mull over the right response to give to men who have offended us. Beautiful women are offended all the time.
- Parthenope: Professor Marotta, what is anthropology?
- Devoto Marotta: You young people want answers, but you don't know how to ask questions.
- Devoto Marotta: Are you not satisfied?
- Parthenope: No. Your answer is just a catchphrase.
- Devoto Marotta: Anthropology is the science that studies human types and aspects from a morphological and psychological perspective.
- Parthenope: Is that the right answer?
- Devoto Marotta: No, that's just the answer you can afford. Lévi-Strauss, first phase.