"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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Quote collection
Umberto Eco quotes (page 12 of 19)
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, "We don't know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning." So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment."
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"We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry."
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"Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth."
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"In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace."
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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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"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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"In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness."
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"The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us."
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"Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered."
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"The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation."
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"A novel is a machine for generating interpretations."
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"We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us."
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"How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon."
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"I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing."
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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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"I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become."
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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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"A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor."
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"But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong."
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