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"I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed."
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"Great is the difference betwixt a man's being frightened at, and humbled for his sins."

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."

"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions."

"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

"Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beaches. Lets go inland and be killed."
Explore more quotes by Umberto Eco

"There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation."

"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."

"People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction."

"I'd lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there's always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us."

"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything."

"A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion."

"The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns from whence he came."

"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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