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Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.
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
Normal
Moron
Type
Lunatic
Four
Components
Persons
Types
Person
Ideal
Sometimes
Reasonable
Ideals
Fool
Pendulums
More quotes by Umberto Eco
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
For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.
Umberto Eco
Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
Umberto Eco
Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.
Umberto Eco
I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.
Umberto Eco
In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .
Umberto Eco
The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
Umberto Eco
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
Umberto Eco
I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.
Umberto Eco
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Umberto Eco
My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth.
Umberto Eco
I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.
Umberto Eco
The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.
Umberto Eco
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
Umberto Eco
When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
Umberto Eco
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
Umberto Eco
Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
Umberto Eco
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
Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
Umberto Eco
I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
Umberto Eco
