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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 seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
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Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
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To survive, you must tell stories.
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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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There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
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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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In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.
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The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.
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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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Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
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A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.
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The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.
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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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I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
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By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.
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I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
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A newspaper can follow the compulsions, the desires of the readers. Take the English evening newspapers - they are following the readers' desires when they are interested only in the royal family gossip. But even the most objective, serious newspaper in the world designs the way in which the reader could or should think. That's unavoidable.
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For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - le suggérer, voilà le rêve!).
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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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