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1e0d748
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But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.
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Umberto Eco |
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0dc4636
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You live on the surface," Lia told me years later. "You sometimes seem profound, but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you try to stand it up."
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Umberto Eco |
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7bdf245
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to enquiry (William of Baskerville)
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Umberto Eco |
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12a16c9
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Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking , and celebrating a reunion. ( )
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clichés
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Umberto Eco |
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d367fb5
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Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands.
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Umberto Eco |
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fbd53bb
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Le regole per scrivere bene (adattate da Umberto Eco) 1. Evita le allitterazioni, anche se allettano gli allocchi. 2. Non e che il congiuntivo va evitato, anzi, che lo si usa quando necessario. 3. Evita le frasi fatte: e minestra riscaldata. 4. Esprimiti siccome ti nutri. 5. Non usare sigle commerciali & abbreviazioni etc. 6. Ricorda (sempre) che la parentesi (anche quando pare indispensabile) interrompe il filo del discorso. 7. Stai attent..
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regole
scrivere
scrittura
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Umberto Eco |
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1513839
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They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.
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Umberto Eco |
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c6f213d
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For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.
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Umberto Eco |
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66cbda5
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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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Umberto Eco |
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23c6361
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I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion - which I could see he always harbored - that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment.
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truth
suspicion
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Umberto Eco |
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72f4413
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Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist. It's the permutations that matter.
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philosophy
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Umberto Eco |
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ed784cf
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Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.
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Umberto Eco |
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66a7b35
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You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
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Umberto Eco |
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183f0e9
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From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola
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Umberto Eco |
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ed6f207
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The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
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poverty
leprosy
heresy
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Umberto Eco |
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36d2e14
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The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
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time
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Umberto Eco |
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a9a7e9c
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stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus
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Umberto Eco |
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96c067a
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We'll have to see," Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. "Potio-section..." He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. "Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no," he said to Diotallevi. "It's not the department, it's a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all under the same heading of Tetrapyloctomy." "What's tetra...?" I asked. "The art of..
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Umberto Eco |
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f73e111
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You cannot change the world with ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else does and are no trouble to anyone; they're successful, make money, find good jobs, enter politics, receive honours; they become famous writers, academics, journalists. Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid? I'm the stupid one, the one who wanted to go tilting at windmills.
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the-prague-cemetery
umberto-eco
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Umberto Eco |
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360d9d7
|
Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media. Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.
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mass-media
superficiality
culture
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Umberto Eco |
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a2f31be
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But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares." "So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans." "What a disappointment," I said. ..
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religion
fables
mythology
unicorns
symbolism
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Umberto Eco |
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3688522
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Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."
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religion
truth
philosophy-of-religion
theology
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Umberto Eco |
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bec07a3
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I stood back up and looked down at my feces. A lovely snail-shell architecture, still steaming. Borromini. My bowels must be in good shape, because everyone knows you have nothing to worry about unless your feces are to soft or downright liquid. I was seeing my shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush right away, without looking). I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most p..
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Umberto Eco |
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88ad9be
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we read novels because they give us the comfortable sensation of living in worlds where the notion of truth is indisputable, while the actual world seems to be a more treacherous place.
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Umberto Eco |
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cea0f51
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Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
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Umberto Eco |
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1568467
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You're innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got your degree, you didn't shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too, were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything." "Everything?" "Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmo..
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Umberto Eco |
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625c102
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But can I really will anything? At this moment I feel the pleasure of being stone, the sun warms me, the wind makes acceptable this adjustment of my body, I have no intention of ceasing to be a stone. Why? Because I like it. So then I too am slave to a passion, which advises me against wanting freely its opposite. However, willing, I could will. And yet I do not. How much freer am I than a stone?
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Umberto Eco |
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056b0da
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It's hopeless," he went on. "We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!" "We are dwarfs," William admitted, "but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they."
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hope
ancient-learning
knowledge
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Umberto Eco |
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4693a6b
|
The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?
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fate
responsibility
destiny
self-deception
devil
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Umberto Eco |
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61bc21b
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In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
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writing
imagination
obviousness
middle-ages
fire
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Umberto Eco |
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9de9c71
|
What does the philosopher say? Odi ergo sum. I hate therefore I am.
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Umberto Eco |
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1c7fd6a
|
lsdhj dwb tusq l~ lmjzr@, yust`mlwn `ndm yrd wD` slT@ lkhSm fy 'zm@, w yuDH~ bhm `ndm tnthy lHj@ lyhm.
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Umberto Eco |
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8b3c370
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I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.
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Umberto Eco |
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6504f76
|
For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has c..
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poverty
leprosy
exclusion
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Umberto Eco |
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e4b44be
|
Los perdedores, como los autodidactas, tienen siempre conocimientos mas vastos que los ganadores. Si quieres ganar tienes que saber una cosa sola y no perder tiempo en sabertelas todas; el placer de la erudicion esta reservado a los perdedores. Cuanto mas sabe uno, es que peor le han ido las cosas.
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Umberto Eco |
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d6f9926
|
I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
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Umberto Eco |
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69c39af
|
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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Umberto Eco |
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aea9031
|
I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving.
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Umberto Eco |
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24c91b4
|
For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of "Is your novel an open work or not?" How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or "With which of your characters do you identify?" For God's sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously."
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Umberto Eco |
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648c0ae
|
Jacopo Belbo didn't 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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Umberto Eco |
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7725e10
|
The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.
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Umberto Eco |
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49b6cff
|
There was no plot... and I discovered it by mistake.
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Umberto Eco |
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5cf4eb0
|
penitenziagite! watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! death is super nos! pray the santo pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! ha ha, you like this negromanzia de domini nostri jesu christi! et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors...cave el diabolo! semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. but salvatore is not stupidus! bonum monsasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to d..
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Umberto Eco |
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a4bfdef
|
Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?
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Umberto Eco |