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The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

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
Power
Ambiguous
Elusive
Symbol
Significance
Symbols
Gains

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
Umberto Eco
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But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.
Umberto Eco
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Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
Umberto Eco
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That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.
Umberto Eco
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Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.
Umberto Eco
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Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.
Umberto Eco
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Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
Umberto Eco
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Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.
Umberto Eco
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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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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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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
Umberto Eco
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I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
Umberto Eco
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
Umberto Eco
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As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
Umberto Eco
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But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.
Umberto Eco
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How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
Umberto Eco
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He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
Umberto Eco
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Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
Umberto Eco