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There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

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
Thing
Shopping
List
Lists
Write
Writing

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
Umberto Eco
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The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.
Umberto Eco
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I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
Umberto Eco
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The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar queen, alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
Umberto Eco
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My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth.
Umberto Eco
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The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
Umberto Eco
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I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.
Umberto Eco
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I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my Foucault's Pendulum, the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.
Umberto Eco
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The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.
Umberto Eco
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Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
Umberto Eco
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The Devil is not the Prince of Matter the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.
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.
Umberto Eco
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I felt like poisoning a monk.
Umberto Eco
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Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
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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Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
Umberto Eco