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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
Thrown
Useful
Instruments
Away
Truths

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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To survive, you must tell stories.
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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.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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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.
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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.
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For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.
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I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.
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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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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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There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.
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In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.
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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
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It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
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It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
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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.
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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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In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.
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And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.
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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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Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
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