"There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."
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Quote collection
Umberto Eco quotes (page 9 of 19)
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses."
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"A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars."
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"I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way."
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"Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room."
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"I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside."
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"Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame."
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"American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC"
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"The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come."
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"Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for."
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"I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it."
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"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."
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"Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats."
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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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"All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black."
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"But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?" I asked, for no good reason. "Is Jorge right?" "Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . ."
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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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"The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief."
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"Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene."
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"To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was."
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