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All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.

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
Intellectual
Tell
Light
Metaphorical
Real
Identical
Always
Similar
Thinking
Slowly
Allows
Losing

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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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We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.
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Sometimes my characters are not myself.
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An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.
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The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
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Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.
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A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.
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Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats.
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If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
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Then why do you want to know? Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
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Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, How are you, you old scoundrel! clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.
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I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays
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If Bush had read all the documents about the Russians and British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, he would have not done what he did in the 21st. He would have understood how difficult it was to control this territory. He probably didn't read them.
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Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?
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A secret is powerful when it is empty. People often mention the Masonic secret. What on earth is the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.
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I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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