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"Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe-with charity-that there is still room for Hope."
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"Joblessness does not necessarily mean idleness."

"If you want to know the value of a second, ask the person who just crossed the road at the wrong time and barely escaped being hit by a speeding car."

"Three weeks ago, he'd seen hail fall from the sky, onlyto be followed minutes later by a spectacular rainbow that seemed to frame the azalea bushes. The colors, so vivid they seemed almost alive, made him think that nature sometimes sends us signs, that it's important to remember that joy can always follow despair. But a moment later, the rainbow had vanished and the hail returned, and he realized that joy was sometimes only an illusion."

"I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage."

"Life is more valuable than money."

"The poorest people sometimes have the richest minds."

"Life becomes perfect if I look at it through my imperfect perceptions."

"It is not very important where you are, but where your thoughts are taking you is important."

"If the journey to success and happiness was hundred miles, some people would calculate it by meters and get discouraged by the numbers they come up with."

"To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides."
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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