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How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.

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
Sees
Person
Tongue
Enough
Thinks
Listing
Feel
Sky
Tongues
Feels
Simply
Describing
Never
Looking
Stopping
Thinking
Doesn
Nevertheless
People
Doe
Describe

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Simple mechanisms do not love.
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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 mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
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The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.
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In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.
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All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
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There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.
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All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
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And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.
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Living the same sorrows three times was a suffering, but it was a suffering to relive even the same joys. The joy of life is born from feeling, whether it be joy or grief, always of short duration, and woe to those who know they will enjoy eternal bliss.
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When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
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It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating.
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[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
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I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.
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The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.
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If culture did not filter, it would be inane - as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.
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It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.
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I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote I am that I am, for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.
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Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
Umberto Eco