Umberto Eco Quotes
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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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At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call to constantly into question the very tale we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning.
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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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Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
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And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.
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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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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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It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
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You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
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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.
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Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
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You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.
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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.
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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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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.
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You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
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The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.
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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.
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Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.
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To establish what is true is very difficult. Frequently it is easier to establish what is false. And, passing through the false, it's possible to understand something about truth.
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The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.
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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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Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.
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Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.