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The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

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
Thought
Pain
Spent
Feel
Fear
Waste
Feels
Experience
Painting
Writing
Lost
Building
Death
Cities
Remedy
Away
Example
Decades
Makes
Working
Sadness
Moments
Moment
Throw

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
Umberto Eco
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He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
Umberto Eco
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I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
Umberto Eco
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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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After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
Umberto Eco
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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.
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Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.
Umberto Eco
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
Umberto Eco
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We live for books.
Umberto Eco
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Then we are living in a place abandoned by God, I said, disheartened. Have you found any places where God would have felt at home? William asked me, looking down from his great height.
Umberto Eco
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Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!
Umberto Eco
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Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
Umberto Eco
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There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
Umberto Eco
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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
Umberto Eco
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To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
Umberto Eco
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In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Umberto Eco
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The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell - in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
Umberto Eco
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In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.
Umberto Eco
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We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Umberto Eco
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Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.
Umberto Eco