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Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.

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
Doesn
Others
Anything
Trifling
May
Matters
Matter
However
Mean
Listening
Trying
Understand
Something
Use

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
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I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
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And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.
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On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?
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Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.
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Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
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All the theories of conspiracy were always a way to escape our responsibilities. It is a very important kind of social sickness by which we avoid recognizing reality such as it is and avoid our responsibilities.
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But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.
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Love is wiser than wisdom.
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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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Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
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I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.
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We live for books.
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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
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With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China.
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They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?
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Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.
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I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.
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The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
Umberto Eco