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Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.

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
Everything
Book
Background
Backgrounds
Naturally
Depends
Books
Looking

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
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The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless.
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
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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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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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I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
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A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.
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[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
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The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.
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Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.
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All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.
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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.
Umberto Eco
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Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
Umberto Eco
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Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.
Umberto Eco
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Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.
Umberto Eco
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Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
Umberto Eco
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Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
Umberto Eco
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When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
Umberto Eco
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I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote I am that I am, for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.
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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.
Umberto Eco