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A secret is powerful when it is empty.

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
Empty
Secret
Powerful

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed? I asked, for no good reason. Is Jorge right? Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . .
Umberto Eco
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I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
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I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.
Umberto Eco
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The hand of God creates it does not conceal.
Umberto Eco
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Today I realize that many recent exercises in deconstructive reading read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.
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To survive, you must tell stories.
Umberto Eco
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Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.
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.
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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.
Umberto Eco
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...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.
Umberto Eco
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Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
Umberto Eco
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I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
Umberto Eco
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The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
Umberto Eco
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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
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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.
Umberto Eco
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Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.
Umberto Eco