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"People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction."
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"They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment."
"Your moral foundation and character currently depend on what you hear."
"To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed."
"Life wants you to know that feelings are more important than facts, and you should never hurt someone just to be right."
"Ethics are the things that say, 'Don't stick your finger in the socket.' The world says, 'It's okay because we've shut off the electricity.' And at the point that we've chosen to listen to the world and ignore our ethics, we say, 'I'm having a really hard time getting back up."
Explore more quotes by Umberto Eco
"The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless."
"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."
"When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love."
"All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful."
"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."
"Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings."
"When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules."
"The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb."
"Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow."
"I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly."
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