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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. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom."
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"As long as you live, keep learning how to live."

"The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned."

"To learn how to swim, observe fish; how to hunt, observe lions; how to work, observe bees, and how to live, observe sages."

"The most important thing about the quest for knowledge is that it should never end."

"It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."

"The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first."

"This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. And the important function of play is thus revealed: it permits us to gain, without any particular future application in mind, a holistic understanding of the world, which is both a complement of and a preparation for later analytical activities."

"The only way to educate oneself is by making books a life companion."
Explore more quotes by Umberto Eco


"I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed."


"If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television."


"Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do."


"I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it)."


"There, Master Niketas,' Baudolino said, 'when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,' he said, 'to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."


"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."


"I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly."


"It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once."
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