Quote

Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats.

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
Social
Material
Form
Materials
Become
Demand
Great
Conversation
Embarrass
Fool
Diplomats
Positive
Fools
Especially
Occasions
Everyone
Provide

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Living the same sorrows three times was a suffering, but it was a suffering to relive even the same joys. The joy of life is born from feeling, whether it be joy or grief, always of short duration, and woe to those who know they will enjoy eternal bliss.
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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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I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
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Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
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To establish what is true is very difficult. Frequently it is easier to establish what is false. And, passing through the false, it's possible to understand something about truth.
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To survive, you must tell stories.
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To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was.
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Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.
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I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
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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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Is it possible to say It was a beautiful morning at the end of November without feeling like Snoopy?
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Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
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My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.
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There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.
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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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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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I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
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I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.
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