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We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

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
Books
Live
Book
Dominated
World
Decay
Disorder
Mission
Missions
Sweet

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.
Umberto Eco
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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
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Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.
Umberto Eco
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I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.
Umberto Eco
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We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.
Umberto Eco
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Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
Umberto Eco
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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
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There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.
Umberto Eco
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But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
Umberto Eco
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Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
Umberto Eco
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... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
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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A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
Umberto Eco
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The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
Umberto Eco
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A secret is powerful when it is empty. People often mention the Masonic secret. What on earth is the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.
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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Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.
Umberto Eco