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Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.

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
Talked
Kind
Interpretive
Deciding

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What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
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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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How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
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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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For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines - some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege - I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words.
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.
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Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.
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Our most noted satirists are true columnists and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented exposé.
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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.
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I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
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To survive, you must tell stories.
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Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
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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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The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maidens?
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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
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Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.
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It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
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There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
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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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