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But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

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
Story
Purpose
Stories
World
Snares
Teaches
Recognize
Please
Teach

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I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.
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The hand of God creates it does not conceal.
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Authors frequently say things they are unaware of only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said
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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.
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There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
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Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
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...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).
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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.
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That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.
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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.
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They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because cats live by their ability to smell, it can no longer recognize things. I'm a cat that hit its nose.
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That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.
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An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.
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We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.
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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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In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .
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Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
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The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar queen, alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
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Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
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