"As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa."
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Quote collection
Umberto Eco quotes (page 15 of 19)
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything."
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"Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence."
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"The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education."
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"The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature."
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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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"Every thing thinks, but according to its complexity. If this is so, then stones also think...and this stone thinks only I stone, I stone, I stone. But perhaps it cannot even say I. It thinks: Stone, stone, stone... God enjoys being All, as this stone enjoys being almost nothing, but since it knows no other way of being, it is pleased with its own way, eternally satisfied with itself."
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"One can be a great poet and be politically stupid."
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"Our most noted satirists are true columnists and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented exposé."
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"When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment."
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"Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend."
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"Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed."
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"The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist."
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"It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating."
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"For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines - some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege - I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words."
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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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"The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."
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"The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea."
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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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