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Then why do you want to know? Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

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
Learning
Knowing
Inspirational
Also
Doe
Must
Consist
Intelligence
Perhaps

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For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.
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I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.
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Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
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I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
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Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
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Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
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The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
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I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
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I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
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I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
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What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
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Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
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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.
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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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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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The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.
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The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.
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What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
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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.
Umberto Eco