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I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.

Umberto Eco

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Umberto Eco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: February 19
Essayist
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Pedagogue
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Lissändria
Umberto Ecco
Umberto Eccounstino
Humberto Eco
Dedalus
Umberto Eko
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Eco Umberto
U. Eco
Assuming
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More quotes by Umberto Eco

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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.
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I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
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Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.
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I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.
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There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
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...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).
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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
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A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
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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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A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
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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.
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If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.
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People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
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You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
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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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Then we are living in a place abandoned by God, I said, disheartened. Have you found any places where God would have felt at home? William asked me, looking down from his great height.
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Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.
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With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China.
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I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
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