Umberto Eco Quotes
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It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.
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I write what I write.
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There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
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As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
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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.
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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.
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When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
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The language of Europe is translation.
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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.
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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.'
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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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You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.
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I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
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... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
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At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.
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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.
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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."
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A human best, which is very little. Its hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.
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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.
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We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
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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.
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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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I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
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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.