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Umberto Eco Inspirational Quotes (339)

Page 10 of 15
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A secret is powerful when it is empty.
Umberto Eco
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A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.
Umberto Eco
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If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.
Umberto Eco
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Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?
Umberto Eco
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From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.
Umberto Eco
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All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
Umberto Eco
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The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.
Umberto Eco
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The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.
Umberto Eco
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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
Umberto Eco
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Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
Umberto Eco
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There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
Umberto Eco
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History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
Umberto Eco
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Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
Umberto Eco
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The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
Umberto Eco
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The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.
Umberto Eco
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I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
Umberto Eco
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Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
Umberto Eco
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You cannot believe what you are saying. Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry.
Umberto Eco
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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
Umberto Eco
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I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.
Umberto Eco
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Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
Umberto Eco
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The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
Umberto Eco
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What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
Umberto Eco
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As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
Umberto Eco
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