Umberto Eco Quotes
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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
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You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
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Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.
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There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
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With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.
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Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
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There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.
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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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My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
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History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
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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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The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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A sign is not only something which stands for something else; it is also something that can and must be interpreted. The criterion of interpretability allows us to start from a given sign to cover, step by step, the whole universe of semiosis.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
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Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.
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Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
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The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
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Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
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Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
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You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
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In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.