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The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.

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
Away
Truths
Thrown
Useful
Instruments

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I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.
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The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.
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The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
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He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
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Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
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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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A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
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The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.
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You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.
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One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view.
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Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
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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.
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They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because cats live by their ability to smell, it can no longer recognize things. I'm a cat that hit its nose.
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Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
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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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History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.
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For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.
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