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Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.
Umberto Eco -
I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
Umberto Eco
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From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.
Umberto Eco -
The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.
Umberto Eco -
There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
Umberto Eco -
The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
Umberto Eco -
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
Umberto Eco -
At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.
Umberto Eco
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New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing."
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
The language of Europe is translation.
Umberto Eco -
For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.
Umberto Eco -
... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
Umberto Eco -
Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
Umberto Eco
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'That man is … odd,' I dared say to William.'He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.'
Umberto Eco -
Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
Umberto Eco -
Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.
Umberto Eco -
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
We've got to help each other, seeing as God doesn't help us. Do you see how great Jesus' idea was? Imagine how much it must have irritated God. Forget the devil, Jesus was the only true enemy of God, and he's the only friend us poor wretches have.
Umberto Eco
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We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Umberto Eco -
Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all.
Umberto Eco -
Signs are not empirical objects. Empirical objects become signs (or they are looked at as signs) only from the point of view of a philosophical decision.
Umberto Eco -
Jacopo Belbo didnt understand that he had had his moment and that it would have to be enough for him, for all his life. Not recognizing it, he spent the rest of his days seeking something else, until he damned himself.
Umberto Eco