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The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.

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
Facts
Illusion
Also
Effects
Time
Cause
Modern
Linear
Causes
Sequence
Belief
Directed
Fact
Producing
Running
Effect

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He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
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That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.
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National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.
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He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
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All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
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They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?
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Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
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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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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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Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.
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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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A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
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I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.
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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 real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.
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I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
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We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
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Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
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