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The West Has Decided To Channel Money And Effort Into Studying Other Customs And Practices, But No One Has Really Given Other People The Chance To Study Western Customs And Practices, Except At Schools Maintained By White Expatriates, Or By Allowing The Rich From Other Cultures To Study In Oxford Or Paris. What Happens Then Is That They Return Home To Organise Fundamentalist Movements, Because They Feel Solidarity With Those Of Their Compatriots Who Lack The Opportunity For Such Education.

-Umberto Eco

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The West Has Decided

Umberto Eco

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The West Has Decided To Channel Money And Effort Into Studying Other Customs And Practices, But No One Has Really Given Other People The Chance To Study Western Customs And Practices, Except At Schools Maintained By White Expatriates, Or By Allowing The Rich From Other Cultures To Study In Oxford Or Paris. What Happens Then Is That They Return Home To Organise Fundamentalist Movements, Because They Feel Solidarity With Those Of Their Compatriots Who Lack The Opportunity For Such Education.

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Our Most Noted Satirists Are True Columnists And Their Opinions Can Be Worth More Than Any Well-documented Exposé.

When One Starts Writing A Book, Especially A Novel, Even The Humblest Person In The World Hopes To Become Homer.

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All The Theories Of Conspiracy Were Always A Way To Escape Our Responsibilities. It Is A Very Important Kind Of Social Sickness By Which We Avoid Recognizing Reality Such As It Is And Avoid Our Responsibilities.

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But I Had Also Learned That Freedom Of Speech Means Freedom From Rhetoric.

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To Play The Trumpet, You Must Train Your Lips For A Long Time. When I Was Twelve Or Thirteen I Was A Good Player, But I Lost The Skill And Now I Play Very Badly. I Do It Every Day Even So. The Reason Is That I Want To Return To My Childhood. For Me, The Trumpet Is Evidence Of The Sort Of Young Man I Was.

Being A Professional Philosopher Is, I Would Say, Feeling Natural To Think About Small And Great Problems. It Is The Only Pleasure.

Deciding What Is Being Talked About Is A Kind Of Interpretive Bet.

There Must Be A Connection Between The Lust For Power And Impotentia Coeundi. I Liked Marx, I Was Sure That He And His Jenny Had Made Love Merrily. You Can Feel It In The Easy Pace Of His Prose And In His Humor. On The Other Hand, I Remember Remarking One Day In The Corridors Of The University That If You Screwed Krupskaya All The Time, You'd End Up Writing A Lousy Book Like Materialism And Empiriocriticism.

A Democratic Civilization Will Save Itself Only If It Makes The Language Of The Image Into A Stimulus For Critical Reflection - Not An Invitation For Hypnosis.

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A Sure Sign Of A Lunatic Is That Sooner Or Later, He Brings Up The Templars.

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I Am Firmly Of The Opinion That The Macintosh Is Catholic And That Dos Is Protestant. Indeed, The Macintosh Is Counterreformist And Has Been Influenced By The Methodical Path Of The Jesuits.... It Is Catechistic: The Essence Of Revelation Is Dealt With Via Simple Formulae And Sumptuous Icons. Everyone Has A Right To Salvation. Dos Is Protestant, Or Even Calvinistic. It Allows Free Interpretation Of Scripture, Demands Difficult Personal Decisions, Imposes A Subtle Hermeneutics Upon The User, And Takes For Granted The Idea That All Can Reach Salvation.

The Cultivated Person's First Duty Is To Be Always Prepared To Rewrite The Encyclopedia.

I Am An Old Consumer Of Papers. I Cannot Avoid Reading My Newspapers Every Morning.

Idiot. Above Her Head Was The Only Stable Point In The Cosmos, The Only Refuge From The Damnation Of The Panta Rei, And She Guessed It Was The Pendulum's Business. A Moment Later The Couple Went Off -- He, Trained On Some Textbook That Had Blunted His Capacity For Wonder, She, Inert And Insensitive To The Thrill Of The Infinite, Both Oblivious Of The Awesomeness Of Their Encounter -- Their First And Last Encounter -- With The One, The Ein-sof, The Ineffable. How Could You Fail To Kneel Down Before This Altar Of Certitude?

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.

Fools Are In Great Demand, Especially On Social Occasions. They Embarrass Everyone But Provide Material For Conversation. In Their Positive Form, They Become Diplomats.

The Print Does Not Always Have The Same Shape As The Body That Impressed It, And It Doesn't Always Derive From The Pressure Of A Body. At Times It Reproduces The Impression A Body Has Left In Our Mind: It Is The Print Of An Idea.

In Other Words, Although I Don't Like Them, We Do Need Noble-spirited Souls.

Homer's Work Hits Again And Again On The Topos Of The Inexpressible. People Will Always Do That.

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Yesterday's Rose Endures In Its Name, We Hold Empty Names.

Beauty Is, In Some Way, Boring. Even If Its Concept Changes Through The Ages... A Beautiful Object Must Always Follow Certain Rules. A Beautiful Nose Shouldn't Be Longer Than That Or Shorter Than That, On The Contrary, An Ugly Nose Can Be As Long As The One Of Pinocchio, Or As Big As The Trunk Of An Elephant, Or Like The Beak Of An Eagle, And So Ugliness Is Unpredictable, And Offers An Infinite Range Of Possibility. Beauty Is Finite, Ugliness Is Infinite Like God.

The Art Of Splitting Hairs Four Ways. This Is The Department Of Useless Techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, For Example, Is How To Build Machines For Greeting Uncles. We're Not Sure, Though, If Pylocatabasis Belongs, Since It's The Art Of Being Saved By A Hair. Somehow That Doesn't Seem Completely Useless.

National Identity Is The Last Bastion Of The Dispossessed. But The Meaning Of Identity Is Now Based On Hatred, On Hatred For Those Who Are Not The Same.

The Problem With The Internet Is That It Gives You Everything - Reliable Material And Crazy Material. So The Problem Becomes, How Do You Discriminate?

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I Am Not On Facebook And On Twitter Because The Purpose Of My Life Is To Avoid Messages. I Receive Too Many Messages From The World, And So I Try To Avoid That.

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I Started To Work In Television For Three Or Four Years, In 1954. There Was One Channel Of Television, Black And White. But It Could Be Entertaining And Educational. During The Evening They Showed Important Plays, Opera Or Shakespeare's Tragedies.

Black And White

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What We Honor As Prudence In Our Elders Is Simply Panic In Action.

I Felt No Passion, No Jealousy, No Nostalgia. I Was Hollow, Clear-headed, Clean, And As Emotionless As An Aluminum Pot.

Mystical Additions And Subtractions Always Come Out The Way You Want.

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I Have Always Been Fascinated By Paranoid People Imagining Conspiracies. I Am Fascinated By This In A Critical Way.

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Because Of Lies, We Can Produce And Invent A Possible World.

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The Step Between Ecstatic Vision And Sinful Frenzy Is All Too Brief.

It Is Psychologically Very Hard To Go Through Life Without The Justification, And The Hope, Provided By Religion.

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... Luckily, Eden Is Soon Populated. The Ethical Dimension Begins When The Other Appears On The Scene.

I Have Lost The Freedom Of Not Having An Opinion.

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Is It Worth It To Be Born If You Cannot Remember It Later? And, Technically Speaking, Had I Ever Been Born? Other People, Of Course, Said That I Was. As Far As I Know, I Was Born In Late April, At Sixty Years Of Age, In A Hospital Room.

History Is Rich With Adventurous Men, Long On Charisma, With A Highly Developed Instinct For Their Own Interests, Who Have Pursued Personal Power - Bypassing Parliaments And Constitutions, Distributing Favours To Their Minions, And Conflating Their Own Desires With The Interests Of The Community.

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.

For The Enemy To Be Recognized And Feared, He Has To Be In Your Home Or On Your Doorstep.

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I Believe That You Can Reach The Point Where There Is No Longer Any Difference Between Developing The Habit Of Pretending To Believe And Developing The Habit Of Believing.

Beauty Is Boring Because It Is Predictable.

You Tell Me These Two Were My Parents, So Now I Know But It's A Memory That You've Given Me. I'll Remember The Photo From Now On, But Not Them.

Then Why Do You Want To Know?" "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.

But Laughter Is Weakness, Corruption, The Foolishness Of Our Flesh.

"you Cannot Believe What You Are Saying." "well, No. Hardly Ever. But The Philosopher Is Like The Poet. The Latter Composes Ideal Letters For An Ideal Nymph, Only To Plumb With His Words The Depths Of Passion. The Philosopher Tests The Coldness Of His Gaze, To See How Far He Can Undermine The Fortress Of Bigotry."

Given That There Are Seven Billion People Living On This Earth, There Is A Consistent Quantity Of Imbecile Or Idiot, Okay. Previously, These People Could Express Themselves Only With Their Friends Or At The Bar After Two Or Three Glasses Of Something, And They Said Every Silliness, And People Laughed. Now They Have The Possibility To Show Up On The Internet. And So, On The Internet, Along With The Messages Of A Lot Of Interesting And Important People - Even The Pope Is Writing On Twitter - We Have A Great Quantity Of Idiots.

A Narrator Should Not Supply Interpretations Of His Work; Otherwise He Would Have Not Written A Novel, Which Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

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.

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.

We Live For Books.

You Don't Fall In Love Because You Fall In Love; You Fall In Love Because Of The Need, Desperate, To Fall In Love. When You Feel That Need, You Have To Watch Your Step: Like Having Drunk A Philter, The Kind That Makes You Fall In Love With The First Thing You Meet. It Could Be A Duck-billed Platypus.

Falling In Love

I Was A Fervent Catholic, And I Belonged To The National Organizations, Even Becoming One Of The National Leaders, Until The Age Of 21, 22.

The Good Of A Book Lies In Its Being Read.

Is It Possible To Say "it Was A Beautiful Morning At The End Of November" Without Feeling Like Snoopy?

It Is Obvious That The Newspaper Produces The Opinion Of The Readers.

Thus We Have On Stage Two Men, Each Of Whom Knows Nothing Of What He Believes The Other Knows, And To Deceive Each Other Reciprocally Both Speak In Allusions, Each Of The Two Hoping (in Vain) That The Other Holds The Key To His Puzzle.

There Is Only One Thing That Arouses Animals More Than Pleasure, And That Is Pain. Under Torture You Are As If Under The Dominion Of Those Grasses That Produce Visions. Everything You Have Heard Told, Everything You Have Read Returns To Your Mind, As If You Were Being Transported, Not Toward Heaven, But Toward Hell. Under Torture You Say Not Only What The Inquisitor Wants, But Also What You Imagine Might Please Him, Because A Bond (this, Truly, Diabolical) Is Established Between You And Him.

The Most Interesting Letters I Received About 'the Name Of The Rose' Were From People In The Midwest That Maybe Didn't Understand Exactly, But Wanted To Understand More And Who Were Excited By This Picture Of A World Which Was Not Their Own.

We Invented The Car, And It Made It Easier For Us To Crash And Die. If I Gave A Car To My Grandfather, He Would Die In Five Minutes, While I Have Grown Up Slowly To Accept Speed.

I Suspect That There Is No Serious Scholar Who Doesn’t Like To Watch Television. I’m Just The Only One Who Confesses.

Jacopo Belbo Didnt Understand That He Had Had His Moment And That It Would Have To Be Enough For Him, For All His Life. Not Recognizing It, He Spent The Rest Of His Days Seeking Something Else, Until He Damned Himself.

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Only An Unhinged Movie Survives As A Disconnected Series Of Images, Of Peaks, Of Visual Icebergs. It Should Display Not One Central Idea But Many. It Should Not Reveal A Coherent Philosophy Of Composition. It Must Live On, And Because Of, Its Glorious Ricketiness.

I Lacked The Courage To Investigate The Weaknesses Of The Wicked, Because I Discovered They Are The Same As The Weaknesses Of The Saintly.

After So Many Years Even The Fire Of Passion Dies, And With It What Was Believed The Light Of The Truth. Who Of Us Is Able To Say Now Whether Hector Or Achilles Was Right, Agamemnon Or Priam, When They Fought Over The Beauty Of A Woman Who Is Now Dust And Ashes?

I Don't See The Point Of Having 80 Million People Online If All They Are Doing In The End Is Talking To Ghosts In The Suburbs.

How Does A Person Feel When Looking At The Sky? He Thinks That He Doesn't Have Enough Tongues To Describe What He Sees. Nevertheless, People Have Never Stopping Describing The Sky, Simply Listing What They See.

Captain Cook Discovered Australia Looking For The Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus Thought He Was Finding India But Discovered America. History Is Full Of Events That Happened Because Of An Imaginary Tale.

Show Not What Has Been Done, But What Can Be. How Beautiful The World Would Be If There Were A Procedure For Moving Through Labyrinths.

Whenever A Poet Or Preacher, Chief Or Wizard Spouts Gibberish, The Human Race Spends Centuries Deciphering The Message.

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Contemporary Societies Have Lost The Sense Of The Feast But Have Kept The Obscure Drive For It.

There Is A Constant In The Average American Imagination And Taste, For Which The Past Must Be Preserved And Celebrated In Full-scale Authentic Copy; A Philosophy Of Immortality As Duplication. It Dominates The Relation With The Self, With The Past, Not Infrequently With The Present, Always With History And, Even, With The European Tradition.

There Is Only One Thing That You Write For Yourself, And That Is A Shopping List.

And What Would We Be, We Sinful Creatures, Without Fear, Perhaps The Most Foresighted, The Most Loving Of The Divine Gifts?

Daytime Sleep Is Like The Sin Of The Flesh; The More You Have The More You Want, And Yet You Feel Unhappy, Sated And Unsated At The Same Time.

The Only Truths That Are Useful Are Instruments To Be Thrown Away.

If You Want To Become A Man Of Letters And Perhaps Write Some Histories One Day, You Must Also Lie And Invent Tales, Otherwise Your History Would Become Monotonous. But You Must Act With Restraint. The World Condemns Liars Who Do Nothing But Lie, Even About The Most Trivial Things, And It Rewards Poets, Who Lie Only About The Greatest Things.

I Think Of Myself As A Serious Professor Who, During The Weekend, Writes Novels.

Better Reality Than A Dream: If Something Is Real, Then It's Real And You're Not To Blame.

Your Masters At Oxford Have Taught You To Idolize Reason, Drying Up The Prophetic Capacities Of Your Heart!

Libraries Are Fascinating Places: Sometimes You Feel You Are Under The Canopy Of A Railway Station, And When You Read Books About Exotic Places There's A Feeling Of Travelling To Distant Lands

Beauty Has Never Been Absolute And Immutable But Has Taken On Different Aspects Depending On The Historical Period And The Country

It Is Sometimes Hard To Grasp The Difference Between Identifying With One's Own Roots, Understanding People With Other Roots, And Judging What Is Good Or Bad.

Not Bad, Not Bad At All," Diotallevi Said. "to Arrive At The Truth Through The Painstaking Reconstruction Of A False Text.

Followers Of The Occult Believe In Only What They Already Know, And In Those Things That Confirm What They Have Already Learned.

There Are Four Kinds Of People In This World: Cretins, Fools, Morons, And Lunatics.

I Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

And When Someone Suggests You Believe In A Proposition, You Must First Examine It To See Whether It Is Acceptable, Because Our Reason Was Created By God, And Whatever Pleases Our Reason Can But Please Divine Reason, Of Which, For That Matter, We Know Only What We Infer From The Processes Of Our Own Reason By Analogy And Often By Negation.

I Felt Like Poisoning A Monk.

When We Traded The Results Of Our Fantasies, It Seemed To Us-and Rightly-that We Had Proceeded By Unwarranted Associations, By Shortcuts So Extraordinary That, If Anyone Had Accused Us Of Really Believing Them, We Would Have Been Ashamed.

We Know That Sensory Phenomena Are Transcribed In The Photographic Emulsion In Such A Way That Even If There Is A Causal Link With The Real Phenomena, The Graphic Images Can Be Considered As Wholly Arbitrary With Respect To These Phenomena.

The First Quality Of An Honest Man Is Contempt For Religion, Which Would Have Us Afraid Of The Most Natural Thing In The World, Which Is Death; And Would Have Us Hate The One Beautiful Thing Destiny Has Given Us, Which Is Life.

To Read Fiction Means To Play A Game By Which We Give Sense To The Immensity Of Things That Happened, Are Happening, Or Will Happen In The Actual World. By Reading Narrative, We Escape The Anxiety That Attacks Us When We Try To Say Something True About The World. This Is The Consoling Function Of Narrative — The Reason People Tell Stories, And Have Told Stories From The Beginning Of Time.

It Is Necessary To Meditate Early, And Often, On The Art Of Dying To Succeed Later In Doing It Properly Just Once.

[i Am Fascinated By Stupidity] Because Normal Intelligence Is Boring. Two Plus Two Makes Four - Finished. You Have No Possibilities! Stupidity Is Infinite. Two Plus Two Can Make Billions Of Different Numbers.

A Book Is A Fragile Creature. It Suffers The Wear Of Time, It Fears Rodents, The Elements, Clumsy Hands.

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.

And So I Fell Devoutly Asleep And Slept A Long Time, Because Young People Seem To Need Sleep More Than The Old, Who Have Already Slept So Much And Are Preparing To Sleep For All Eternity.

They Say That A Cat, If It Falls From A Window And Hits Its Nose, Can Lose Its Sense Of Smell And Then, Because Cats Live By Their Ability To Smell, It Can No Longer Recognize Things. I'm A Cat That Hit Its Nose.

If Culture Did Not Filter, It Would Be Inane - As Inane As The Formless, Boundless Internet Is On Its Own. And If We All Possessed The Boundless Knowledge Of The Web, We Would Be Idiots! Culture Is An Instrument For Making A Hierarchical System Of Intellectual Labor.

My Collection Of Rare Books Concerns Only Books That Don't Tell The Truth.

Telling The Truth

The Internet Gives Us Everything And Forces Us To Filter It Not By The Workings Of Culture, But With Our Own Brains. This Risks Creating Six Billion Separate Encyclopedias, Which Would Prevent Any Common Understanding Whatsoever.

Where Else? I Belong To A Lost Generation And Am Comfortable Only In The Company Of Others Who Are Lost And Lonely.

The Art Of The Romance, Though Warning Us That It Is Providing Fictions, Opens A Door Into The Palace Of Absurdity, And When We Have Lightly Stepped Inside, Slams It Shut Behind Us.

History Is A Blood-drenched Enigma And The World An Error.

The Mobile Phone... Is A Tool For Those Whose Professions Require A Fast Response, Such As Doctors Or Plumbers.

Someone Said That Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of Cowards; Those Without Moral Principles Usually Wrap A Flag Around Themselves, And Those Bastards Always Talk About The Purity Of Race.

I Don't Know, Maybe We're Always Looking For The Right Place, Maybe It's Within Reach, But We Don't Recognize It. Maybe To Recognize It, We Have To Believe In 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.

I Don't Want To Write A Novel Per Year. I Know That I Need A Break Of One Or Two Years. So Maybe I Invent Some New, Urgent Activity So I Don't Fall Into The Trap Of Starting A New Novel.

One Of The Problems I Have Always Discussed Is The Refusal To Distinguish Between Comment And Fact. The Newspaper Wraps Every Fact Into A Comment. It Is Impossible To Give Mere Fact Without Establishing Point Of View.

There Are More Books In The World Than Hours In Which To Read Them. We Are Thus Deeply Influenced By Books We Haven't Read, That We Haven't Had The Time To Read.

In The United States, Politics Is A Profession, Whereas In Europe It Is A Right And A Duty .

A Transposable Aphorism Is A Malaise Of The Urge To Be Witty, Or In Other Words, A Maxim That Is Untroubled By The Fact That The Opposite Of What It Says Is Equally True So Long As It Appears To Be Funny.

Absence Is To Love As Wind Is To Fire: It Extinguishes The Little Flame, It Fans The Big.

Entering A Novel Is Like Going On A Climb In The Mountains: You Have To Learn The Rhythms Of Respiration - Acquire The Pace. Otherwise You Stop Right Away.

A Secret Is Powerful When It Is Empty.

Libraries Can Take The Place Of God.

I Started To Write [the Name Of The Rose] In March Of 1978, Moved By A Seminal Idea. I Wanted To Poison A Monk.

Two Cliches Make Us Laugh. A Hundred Cliches Move Us. For We Sense Dimly That The Cliches Are Talking Among Themselves, And Celebrating A Reunion.

The Monkish Vows Keep Us Far From That Sink Of Vice That Is The Female Body, But Often They Bring Us Close To Other Errors. Can I Finally Hide From Myself The Fact That Even Today My Old Age Is Still Stirred By The Noonday Demon When My Eyes, In Choir, Happen To Linger On The Beardless Face Of A Novice, Pure And Fresh As A Maidens?

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.

Never Affirm, Always Allude: Allusions Are Made To Test The Spirit And Probe The Heart.

Ugliness Is More Inventive Than Beauty. Beauty Always Follows Certain Camps. I Think It's More Amusing - Ugliness - Than Beauty.

All Of Us Were Slowly Losing That Intellectual Light That Allows You Always To Tell The Similar From The Identical, The Metaphorical From The Real.

The Light In Her Eyes Was Beyond Description, Yet It Did Not Instill Improper Thoughts: It Inspired A Love Tempered By Awe, Purifying The Hearts It Inflamed.

He Who Falls In Love In Bars Doesn't Need A Woman All His Own. He Can Always Find One On Loan.

With All Of Its Defects, The Global Market Makes War Less Likely, Even Between The Usa And China.

You Can Be Obsessed By Remorse All Your Life, Not Because You Chose The Wrong Thing- You Can Always Repent, Atone : But Because You Never Had The Chance To Prove To Yourself That You Would Have Chosen The Right Thing.

For Centuries, As Pope And Emperor Tore Each Other Apart In Their Quarrels Over Power, The Excluded Went On Living On The Fringe, Like Lepers, Of Whom True Lepers Are Only The Illustration Ordained By God To Make Us Understand This Wondrous Parable, So That In Saying 'lepers' We Would Understand 'outcast, Poor, Simple, Excluded, Uprooted From The Countryside, Humiliated In The Cities.' But We Did Not Understand; The Mystery Of Leprosy Has Continued To Haunt Us Because We Have Not Recognized The Nature Of The Sign.

A Dream Is A Scripture, And Many Scriptures Are Nothing But Dreams.

Nothing Gives A Fearful Man More Courage Than Another's Fear.

Libraries Have Always Been Humanities' Way Of Preserving Its Collective Wisdom

The Hand Of God Creates; It Does Not Conceal.

I Have To Admit That I Only Read War And Peace When I Was 40. But I Knew The Basics Before Then.

Religion Has Nothing To Do With God. It's A Fundamental Attitude Of Human Beings, Who Ask About The Origins Of Life And What Happens After Death. For Many, The Answer Is A Personal God. In My Opinion, It's Religion That Produces God, Not The Other Way Round.

If Somebody Writes A Book And Doesn't Care For The Survival Of That Book, He's An Imbecile.

The Book Is Like The Spoon, Scissors, The Hammer, The Wheel. Once Invented, It Cannot Be Improved. You Cannot Make A Spoon That Is Better Than A Spoon... The Book Has Been Thoroughly Tested, And It's Very Hard To See How It Could Be Improved On For Its Current Purposes.

The Thought That All Experience Will Be Lost At The Moment Of My Death Makes Me Feel Pain And Fear... What A Waste, Decades Spent Building Up Experience, Only To Throw It All Away... We Remedy This Sadness By Working. For Example, By Writing, Painting, Or Building Cities.

We Were Clever Enough To Turn A Laundry List Into Poetry.

The Truth Is A Young Maiden As Modest As She Is Beautiful, And Therefore She Is Always Seen Cloaked.

My Poetry Had The Same Functional Origin And The Same Formal Configuration As Teenage Acne.

The Truth Is An Anagram Of An Anagram.

The Fundamental Principle That Governs - Or Ought To Govern -human Affairs If We Wish To Avoid Misunderstandings, Conflicts, Or Pointless Utopias, Is Negotiation.

But It Has Often Happened That I Have Found The Most Seductive Depictions Of Sin In The Pages Of Those Very Men Of Incorruptible Virtue Who Condemned Their Spell And Their Effects.

All The Blogs, Facebook, Twitter Are Made By People Who Want To Show Their Own Private Affairs At The Price Of Making Fakes, To Try To Appear Such As They Are Not, To Construct Another Personality, Which Is A Veritable Loss Of Identity.

One Can Be A Great Poet And Be Politically Stupid.

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