Umberto Eco Quotes

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

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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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Terrorism is a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine ... The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the 'heroes' underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise.

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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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The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.

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The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.

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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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There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.

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The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ''I love you madly,'' because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ''As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.''

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I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us.

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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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'Sir,' Saint-Savin replied, 'the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void.'

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What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.

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In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.

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When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches moves us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.... Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

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Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

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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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'You cannot believe what you are saying.' 'Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry.'

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The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

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The comic is the perception of the opposite humor is the feeling of it.

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A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

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Today I realize that many recent exercises in 'deconstructive reading' read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.

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There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

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The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

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Translation is the art of failure.

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