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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
Significance
Symbols
Gains
Power
Ambiguous
Elusive
Symbol

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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A human best, which is very little. Its hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.
Umberto Eco
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I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
Umberto Eco
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Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?
Umberto Eco
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Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.
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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The truth is an anagram of an anagram.
Umberto Eco
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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
Umberto Eco
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I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
Umberto Eco
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Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
Umberto Eco
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The followers must feel besieged.
Umberto Eco
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We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
Umberto Eco
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Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
Umberto Eco
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Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
Umberto Eco
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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
Umberto Eco
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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
Umberto Eco
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A secret is powerful when it is empty.
Umberto Eco
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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
Umberto Eco
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You cannot believe what you are saying. Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry.
Umberto Eco