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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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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
Become
Opposites
Sweetness
Yearnings
Love
Harmony
Desirable
Sorrowful
Laughter
Diamond
Blend
Sorrow
Pleasures
Voluntary
Short
Insanity
Celestial
Hell
Soft
Pains
Pleasure
Paradise
Torment
Pain
Opposite
Yearning
Infernal

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At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call to constantly into question the very tale we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning.
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In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.
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If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.
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Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.
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National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.
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If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.
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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.
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There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.
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My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth.
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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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Not bad, not bad at all, Diotallevi said. To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.
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Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.
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You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
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There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
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