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"I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing."
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"They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing."

"This is what a real teacher does: she opens the gates of our minds to the possibilities of the soul."

"Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."

"If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?"

"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written."

"We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue."
Explore more quotes by Umberto Eco


"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."


"Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth."


"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."


"The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis."


"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)."


"William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound."
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