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Umberto Eco Inspirational Quotes (339)

Page 12 of 15
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I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
Umberto Eco
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Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.
Umberto Eco
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If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to dissolve harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
Umberto Eco
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Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.
Umberto Eco
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Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.
Umberto Eco
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Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.
Umberto Eco
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There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.
Umberto Eco
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We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
Umberto Eco
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Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
Umberto Eco
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As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
Umberto Eco
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Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault's Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
Umberto Eco
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The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
Umberto Eco
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Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
Umberto Eco
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It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
Umberto Eco
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A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.
Umberto Eco
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The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.
Umberto Eco
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A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
Umberto Eco
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I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
Umberto Eco
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Umberto Eco
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The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.
Umberto Eco
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The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless.
Umberto Eco
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In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.
Umberto Eco
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... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
Umberto Eco
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You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
Umberto Eco
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