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In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

Umberto Eco

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Umberto Eco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: February 19
Essayist
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Semiotician
Translator
Lissändria
Umberto Ecco
Umberto Eccounstino
Humberto Eco
Dedalus
Umberto Eko
Oumperto Eko
Eco Umberto
U. Eco
Persons
Latin
Person
Ethics
Country
Catholic
Good
Countries
Successful
Puritan
United
Ethic
Success
Mythology
States
Sinner

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
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The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
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Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
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... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
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If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
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Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
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There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
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We like lists because we don't want to die.
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It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
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All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.
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Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.
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The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
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He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
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What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
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Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.
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There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.
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For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - le suggérer, voilà le rêve!).
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.
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The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
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At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call to constantly into question the very tale we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning.
Umberto Eco