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We Have A Limit, A Very Discouraging, Humiliating Limit: Death. That's Why We Like All The Things That We Assume Have No Limits And, Therefore, No End. It's A Way Of Escaping Thoughts About Death. We Like Lists Because We Don't Want To Die.

-Umberto Eco

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We Have A Limit,

Umberto Eco

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We Have A Limit, A Very Discouraging, Humiliating Limit: Death. That's Why We Like All The Things That We Assume Have No Limits And, Therefore, No End. It's A Way Of Escaping Thoughts About Death. We Like Lists Because We Don't Want To Die.

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That Day, I Began To Be Incredulous. Or, Rather, I Regretted Having Been Credulous. I Regretted Having Allowed Myself To Be Borne Away By A Passion Of The Mind. Such Is Credulity.

I'm Always Fascinated By Losers. Also, In My "foucault's Pendulum," The Main Characters, Who Are In A Way Losers, They Are More Interesting Than The Winners.

Love Is Wiser Than Wisdom.

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

Every Time That I Write A Novel I Am Convinced For At Least Two Years That It Is The Last One, Because A Novel Is Like A Child. It Takes Two Years After Its Birth. You Have To Take Care Of It. It Starts Walking, And Then Speaking.

A Secret Is Powerful When It Is Empty.

It Was Awkward, Revisiting A World You Have Never Seen Before: Like Coming Home, After A Long Journey, To Someone Else’s House.

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.

Usually Naive Interviewers Hover Between Two Mutually Contradictory Convictions: One, That A Text We Call Creative Develops Almost Instantaneously In The Mystic Heat Of Inspirational Raptus; Or The Other, That The Writer Has Followed A Recipe, A Kind Of Secret Set Of Rules That They Would Like To See Revealed. There Is No Set Of Rules, Or, Rather, There Are Many, Varied And Flexible Rules.

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

I Always Assume That A Good Book Is More Intelligent Than Its Author. It Can Say Things That The Writer Is Not Aware Of.

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

Freedom Of Speech

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

Every European Goes On The Streets And Sees Medieval Churches. Not If You Live In Indianapolis. The Most Exciting Letters I Received Were From People In Places Like That.

Until Then I Had Thought Each Book Spoke Of The Things, Human Or Divine, That Lie Outside Books. Now I Realized That Not Infrequently Books Speak Of Books: It Is As If They Spoke Among Themselves. In The Light Of This Reflection, The Library Seemed All The More Disturbing To Me. It Was Then The Place Of A Long, Centuries-old Murmuring, An Imperceptible Dialogue Between One Parchment And Another, A Living Thing, A Receptacle Of Powers Not To Be Ruled By A Human Mind, A Treausre Of Secrets Emanated By Many Minds, Surviving The Death Of Those Who Had Produced Them Or Had Been Their Conveyors.

New Orleans Is Not In The Grip Of A Neurosis Of A Denied Past; It Passes Out Memories Generously Like A Great Lord; It Doesn't Have To Pursue "the Real Thing."

One Can Be A Great Poet And Be Politically Stupid.

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

I Write Stories About Conspiracies And Paranoid Characters While I Am, In Fact, A Very Skeptical Person.

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.

It Takes A Little Time, But The Pleasures Of Cooking Begin Before The Pleasures Of The Palate, And Preparing Means Anticipating.

If Bush Had Read All The Documents About The Russians And British In Afghanistan In The 19th Century, He Would Have Not Done What He Did In The 21st. He Would Have Understood How Difficult It Was To Control This Territory. He Probably Didn't Read Them.

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

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.

There Are Four Types: The Cretin, The Imbecile, The Stupid And The Mad. Normality Is A Balanced Mixture Of All Four.

"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."

By Means Of The Sign, Man Frees Himself From The Here And Now For Abstraction.

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

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

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

Nothing Is More Fleeting Than External Form, Which Withers And Alters Like The Flowers Of The Field At The Appearance Of Autumn.

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.

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.

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

As A Scholar I Am Interested In The Philosophy Of Language, Semiotics, Call It What You Want, And One Of The Main Features Of The Human Language Is The Possibility Of Lying.

Every Great Thinker Is Someone Else's Moron.

For What I Saw At The Abbey Then (and Will Now Recount) Caused Me To Think That Often Inquisitors Create Heretics. And Not Only In The Sense That They Imagine Heretics Where These Do Not Exist, But Also That Inquisitors Repress The Heretical Putrefaction So Vehemently That Many Are Driven To Share In It, In Their Hatred For The Judges. Truly, A Circle Conceived By The Devil. God Preserve Us.

Once You Reach Your Fifties, You Have To Stop Being Interested In The Present And Write Only On Elizabethan Poets.

Thus I Rediscovered What Writers Have Always Known (and Have Told Us Again And Again): Books Always Speak Of Other Books, And Every Story Tells A Story That Has Already Been Told.

Every Thing Thinks, But According To Its Complexity. If This Is So, Then Stones Also Think...and This Stone Thinks Only I Stone, I Stone, I Stone. But Perhaps It Cannot Even Say I. It Thinks: Stone, Stone, Stone... God Enjoys Being All, As This Stone Enjoys Being Almost Nothing, But Since It Knows No Other Way Of Being, It Is Pleased With Its Own Way, Eternally Satisfied With Itself.

Since I Became A Novelist I Have Discovered That I Am Biased. Either I Think A New Novel Is Worse Than Mine And I Don’t Like It, Or I Suspect It Is Better Than My Novels And I Don’t Like It.

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?

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.

I Consider Always The Adult Life To Be The Continuous Retrieval Of Childhood.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Semiotics Is In Principle The Discipline Studying Everything Which Can Be Used In Order To Lie. If Something Cannot Be Used To Tell A Lie, Conversely It Cannot Be Used To Tell The Truth: It Cannot In Fact Be Used "to Tell" At All.

After Years Of Practice, I Can Walk Into A Bookstore And Understand Its Layout In A Few Seconds. I Can Glance At The Spine Of A Book And Make A Good Guess At Its Content From A Number Of Signs.

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

The Belief That Time Is A Linear, Directed Sequence Running From A To B Is A Modern Illusion. In Fact, It Can Also Go From B To A, The Effect Producing The Cause.

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.

But Why Doesn't The Gospel Ever Say That Christ Laughed?" I Asked, For No Good Reason. "is Jorge Right?" "legions Of Scholars Have Wondered Whether Christ Laughed. The Question Doesn't Interest Me Much. I Believe He Never Laughed, Because, Omniscient As The Son Of God Had To Be, He Knew How We Christians Would Behave. . . .

I Was In A Maze. No Matter Which Way I Turned, It Was The Wrong Way.

What Is Love? There Is Nothing In The World, Neither Man Nor Devil Nor Any Thing, That I Hold As Suspect As Love, For It Penetrates The Soul More Than Any Other Thing. Nothing Exists That So Fills And Binds The Heart As Love Does. Therefore, Unless You Have Those Weapons That Subdue It, The Soul Plunges Through Love Into An Immense Abyss.

How Beautiful Was The Spectacle Of Nature Not Yet Touched By The Often Perverse Wisdom Of Man!

You Are Always Born Under The Wrong Sign, And To Live In This World Properly You Have To Rewrite Your Own Horoscope Day By Day.

The French, The Italians, The Germans, The Spanish And The English Have Spent Centuries Killing Each Other.

Killing Each Other

Books Are Not Made To Be Believed, But To Be Subjected To Inquiry.

As An Adolescent I Wrote Comic Books, Because I Read Lots Of Them, And Fantasy Novels Set In Malaysia And Central Africa.

The Good Of A Book Lies In Its Being Read.

In The United States There's A Puritan Ethic And A Mythology Of Success. He Who Is Successful Is Good. In Latin Countries, In Catholic Countries, A Successful Person Is A Sinner.

Media Populism Means Appealing To People Directly Through Media. A Politician Who Can Master The Media Can Shape Political Affairs Outside Of Parliament And Even Eliminate The Mediation Of Parliament.

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

What Did I Really Think Fifteen Years Ago? A Nonbeliever, I Felt Guilty In The Midst Of All Those Believers. And Since It Seemed To Me That They Were In The Right, I Decided To Believe, As You Might Decide To Take An Aspirin: It Can't Hurt And You Might Get Better.

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

My Generation Knew Pretty Well What Happened 50 Years Before Our Birth. Now I Follow All The Quiz Programs Because They Are A Paramount Example Of The Span Of Memory Of The Young Generation - They Are Able To Remember Everything That Happened In Their Life But Not Before.

Remembers Everything

Young Generation

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

To Escape The Power Of The Unknown, To Prove To Yourself That You Don't Believe In It, You Accept Its Spells. Like An Avowed Atheist Who Sees The Devil At Night, You Reason: He Certainly Doesn't Exist; This Is Therefore An Illusion, Perhaps A Result Of Indigestion. But The Devil Is Sure That He Exists, And Believes In His Upside-down Theology. What, Then, Will Frighten Him? You Make The Sign Of The Cross, And He Vanishes In A Puff Of Brimstone.

That Is A Real Attitude - To See Everything As Being Meaningful, Even The Less Important Things, To Prove Something, Even The Greater Problems Of Life.

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

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 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.

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.

We Are Never Racist Against Somebody Who Is Very Far Away. I Don't Know Any Racism Against The Eskimos. To Have A Racist Feeling, There Must Be An Other Who Is Slightly Different From Us - But Is Living Close To Us.

Political Satire Is A Serious Thing. In Democratic Newspapers Throughout The World There Are Daily Cartoons That Often Are Not Even Funny, As Is The Case Especially In Many English-language Newspapers. Instead, They Contain A Political Message, And The Artist Takes Full Responsibility.

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.

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

Monsters Exist Because They Are Part Of The Divine Plan, And In The Horrible Features Of Those Same Monsters The Power Of The Creator Is Revealed.

To Establish What Is True Is Very Difficult. Frequently It Is Easier To Establish What Is False. And, Passing Through The False, It's Possible To Understand Something About Truth.

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.

Naturally, Everything Depends On One's Background Books And On What One Is Looking For.

People Are Tired Of Simple Things. They Want To Be Challenged.

They [the Templars] Had Read Avicenna, And They Were Not Ignorant, Like The Europeans. How Could You Live Alongside A Tolerant, Mystical, Libertine Culture For Two Centuries Without Succumbing To Its Allure, Particularly When You Compared It To Western Culture, Which Was Crude, Vulgar, Barbaric, And Germanic?

Western Culture

Reflecting On These Complex Relationships Between Reader And Story, Fiction And Life, Can Constitute A Form Of Therapy Against The Sleep Of Reason, Which Generates Monsters.

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.

A Book Is A Fragile Creature, It Suffers The Wear Of Time, It Fears Rodents, The Elements And Clumsy Hands. So The Librarian Protects The Books Not Only Against Mankind But Also Against Nature And Devotes His Life To This War With The Forces Of Oblivion.

I Felt Like Poisoning A Monk.

When You Are On The Dancefloor, There Is Nothing To Do But Dance.

Yes, I Know, It's Not The Truth, But In A Great History Little Truths Can Be Altered So That The Greater Truth Emerges.

What Is Life If Not The Shadow Of A Fleeting Dream?

There Are More People Than You Think Who Want To Have A Challenging Experience, In Which They Are Obliged To Reflect About The Past.

But Italy Is Not An Intellectual Country. On The Subway In Tokyo Everybody Reads. In Italy, They Don't. Don't Evaluate Italy From The Fact That It Produced Raphael And Michelangelo.

The Lunatic Is All Idée Fixe, And Whatever He Comes Across Confirms His Lunacy. You Can Tell Him By The Liberties He Takes With Common Sense, By His Flashes Of Inspiration, And By The Fact That Sooner Or Later He Brings Up The Templars.

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

[in My Writing] I Know That I Have Made A Caricature Out Of [others' Academic] Theories [but] I Think That Caricatures Are Frequently Good Portraits.

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.

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

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.

Whoever Reflects On Four Things I Would Be Better If He Were Never Born: That Which Is Above, That Which Is Below, That Which Is Before, That Which Is After.

I Could Work In The Shower If I Had Plastic Paper.

We Live For Books. A Sweet Mission In This World Dominated By Disorder And Decay.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

How Clear Everything Becomes When You Look From The Darkness Of A Dungeon.

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 Question Of Manuscript Changes Is Very Important For Literary Criticism, The Psychology Of Creation And Other Aspects Of The Study Of Literature.

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

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

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.

I Wrote A Novel Because I Had A Yen To Do It. I Believe This Is Sufficient Reason To Set Out To Tell A Story.

To Read A Paper Book Is Another Experience: You Can Do It On A Ship, On The Branch Of A Tree, On Your Bed, Even If There Is A Blackout.

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

Sooner Or Later

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

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

Every Man Is Obsessed By The Memories Of His Own Youth.

Semiotics Is A General Theory Of All Existing Languages... All Forms Of Communication - Visual, Tactile, And So On... There Is General Semiotics, Which Is A Philosophical Approach To This Field, And Then There Are Many Specific Semiotics.

At Most, Recognizing That Our History Was Inspired By Many Tales We Now Recognize As False Should Make Us Alert, Ready To Call To Constantly Into Question The Very Tale We Believe True, Because The Criterion Of The Wisdom Of The Community Is Based On Constant Awareness Of The Fallibility Of Our Learning.

If Photography Is To Be Likened To Perception, This Is Not Because The Former Is A Natural Process But Because The Latter Is Also Coded.

I Feel That I Am A Scholar Who Only With The Left Hand Writes Novels.

When I Went From Being An Academic To Being A Member Of The Community Of Writers Some Of My Former Colleagues Did Look On Me With A Certain Resentment.

Terrorism [is] A Biological Consequence Of The Multinationals, Just As A Day Of Fever Is The Reasonable Price Of An Effective Vaccine . . . The Conflict Is Between Great Powers, Not Between Demons And Heroes. Unhappily, Therefore, Is The Nation That Finds The "heroes" Underfoot, Especially If They Still Think In Religious Terms And Involve The Population In Their Bloody Ascent To An Uninhabited Paradise.

The Postmodern Reply To The Modern Consists Of Recognizing That The Past, Since It Cannot Really Be Destroyed, Because Its Destruction Leads To Silence, Must Be Revisited: But With Irony, Not Innocently. I Think Of The Postmodern Attitude As That Of A Man Who Loves A Very Cultivated Woman And Knows He Cannot Say To Her, I Love You Madly, Because He Knows That She Knows (and That She Knows That He Knows) That These Words Have Already Been Written By Barbara Cartland. Still, There Is A Solution. He Can Say, As Barbara Cartland Would Put It, I Love You Madly.

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.

If You Want To Use Television To Teach Somebody, You Must First Teach Them How To Use Television.

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

Telling The Truth

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.

American Coffee Can Be A Pale Solution Served At A Temperature Of 100 Degrees Centigrade In Plastic Thermos Cups, Usually Obligatory In Railroad Stations For Purposes Of Genocide, Whereas Coffee Made With An American Percolator, Such As You Find In Private Houses Or In Humble Luncheonettes, Served With Eggs And Bacon, Is Delicious, Fragrant, Goes Down Like Pure Spring Water, And Afterwards Causes Severe Palpitations, Because One Cup Contains More Caffeine Than Four Espressos.

Not That The Incredulous Person Doesn't Believe In Anything. It's Just That He Doesn't Believe In Everything.

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.

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

Creativity Can Only Be Anarchic, Capitalist, Darwinian.

I Do Not Remember Where I Read That There Are Two Kinds Of Poets: The Good Poets, Who At A Certain Point Destroy Their Bad Poems And Go Off To Run Guns In Africa, And The Bad Poets, Who Publish Theirs And Keep Writing More Until They Die.

You Cannot Escape One Infinite, I Told Myself, By Fleeing To Another. You Cannot Escape The Revelation Of The Identical By Taking Refuge In The Illusion Of The Multiple.

Narrativity Presumes A Special Taste For Plot. And This Taste For Plot Was Always Very Present In The Anglo-saxon Countries And That Explains Their High Quality Of Detective Novels.

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.

The Real Hero Is Always A Hero By Mistake; He Dreams Of Being An Honest Coward Like Everybody Else.

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

For Mallarmé Naming An Object Meant Suppressing Three-quarters Of Its Poetic Pleasure (which Consists In The Joy Of Guessing Bit By Bit - "le Suggérer, Voilà Le Rêve!").

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.

He Who Laughs Does Not Believe In What He Laughs At, But Neither Does He Hate It. Therefore, Laughing At Evil Means Not Preparing Oneself To Combat It, And Laughing At Good Means Denying The Power Through Which Good Is Self-propagating.

Books Always Speak Of Other Books.

The Devil Is Not The Prince Of Matter; The Devil Is The Arrogance Of The Spirit, Faith Without Smile, Truth That Is Never Seized By Doubt. The Devil Is Grim Because He Knows Where He Is Going, And, In Moving, He Always Returns Whence He Came.

The Author May Not Interpret. But He Must Tell Why And How He Wrote His Book.

Socrates ... Did Not Write. It Seems Academically Obvious That He Perished Because He Did Not Publish!

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.

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.

The Comic Is The Perception Of The Opposite; Humor Is The Feeling Of It.

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

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

A Novel Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

I Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

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.

Conspiracies Do Exist. Probably In This Moment In New York There Is An Economic Group Making A Conspiracy In Order To Buy Three Banks. But If They Succeed, They Are Immediately Discovered.

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

The Enlightenment, The Age Of Reason, Is Seen As The Beginning Of Modern Depravity.

Books Are Menaced By Books. Any Excess Of Information Produces Silence.

What Does Culture Want? To Make Infinity Comprehensible.

We Live For Books.

But Why Do Some People Support [the Heretics]?" "because It Serves Their Purposes, Which Concern The Faith Rarely, And More Often The Conquest Of Power." "is That Why The Church Of Rome Accuses All Its Adversaries Of Heresy?" "that Is Why, And That Is Also Why It Recognizes As Orthodoxy Any Heresy It Can Bring Back Under Its Own Control Or Must Accept Because The Heresy Has Become Too Strong.

If Two Things Don't Fit, But You Believe Both Of Them, Thinking That Somewhere, Hidden, There Must Be A Third Thing That Connects Them, That's Credulity.

In Short, Roberto Privately Concluded, If You Would Avoid Wars, Never Make Treaties Of Peace.

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

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.

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

I Returned To The Courtyard And Saw That The Sun Had Grown Weaker. Beautiful And Clear As It Had Been, The Morning (as The Day Approached The Completion Of Its First Half) Was Becoming Damp And Misty. Heavy Clouds Moved From The North And Were Invading The Top Of The Mountain, Covering It With A Light Brume. It Seemed To Be Fog, And Perhaps Fog Was Also Rising From The Ground, But At That Altitude It Was Difficult To Distinguish The Mists That Rose From Below And Those That Come Down From Above. It Was Becoming Hard To Discern The Bulk Of The More Distant Buildings.

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.

I Think A Book Should Be Judged 10 Years Later, After Reading And Re-reading It.

I Believe All Sin, Love, Glory Are This: When You Slide Down The Knotted Sheets, Escaping From Gestapo Headquarters, And She Hugs You, There, Suspended, And She Whispers That She's Always Dreamed Of You. The Rest Is Just Sex, Copulation, The Perpetuation Of The Vile Species.

On Sober Reflection, I Find Few Reasons For Publishing My Italian Version Of An Obscure, Neo-gothic French Version Of A Seventeenth Century Latin Edition Of A Work Written In Latin By A German Monk Toward The End Of The Fourteenth Century...first Of All, What Style Should I Employ?

Libraries Can Take The Place Of God.

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.

Stopgaps Do Belong To The Internal Economy Of The Form, Since The Whole Requires Them, Even If Only In A Subordinate Position ... The Stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' Accepts Its Own Banality, Because Without The Speed That The Banal Allows Up, It Would Slow Up A Passage That Is Crucial For The Outcome Of The Work And Its Interpretation.

The Void Is Not Being, But Not Being Cannot Be, Ergo The Void Cannot Be. The Reasoning Was Sound, Because It Denied The Void While Granting That It Could Be Conceived. In Fact, We Can Quite Easily Conceive Things That Do Not Exist. Can A Chimera, Buzzing In The Void, Devour Second Intentions? No, Because Chimeras Do Not Exist, In The Void No Buzzing Can Be Heard, And Intentions Are Mental Things - An Intended Pear Does Not Nourish Us. And Yet I Can Think Of A Chimera Even If It Is Chimerical, Namely, If It Is Not. And The Same With The Void.

We Like Lists Because We Don't Want To Die.

A Newspaper Can Follow The Compulsions, The Desires Of The Readers. Take The English Evening Newspapers - They Are Following The Readers' Desires When They Are Interested Only In The Royal Family Gossip. But Even The Most Objective, Serious Newspaper In The World Designs The Way In Which The Reader Could Or Should Think. That's Unavoidable.

The Only Truth Lies In Learning To Free Ourselves From Insane Passion For The Truth.

I Developed A Passion For The Middle Ages The Same Way Some People Develop A Passion For Coconuts.

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

The Real Hero Is Always A Hero By Mistake.

I Have A Good Memory. But I Would Be Interested In Memory Even If I Had A Bad Memory, Because I Believe That Memory Is Our Soul. If We Lose Our Memory Completely, We Are Without A Soul.

The Ideology Of This America Wants To Establish Reassurance Through Imitation. But Profit Defeats Ideology, Because The Consumers Want To Be Thrilled Not Only By The Guarantee Of The Good But Also By The Shudder Of The Bad.

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

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

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

Man's Principle Trait Is A Readiness To Believe Anything. Otherwise, How Could The Church Have Survived For Almost Two Thousand Years In The Absense Of Universal Gullibility?

Sometimes You Say Things With A Smile With The Precise Intention Of Making It Clear That You Are Not Being Serious, And Are Only Kidding. If I Salute A Friend With A Smile And Say, "how Are You, You Old Scoundrel!" Clearly I Don't Really Mean He's A Scoundrel.

[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.

Even Today, I Frequently Meet Scientists Who, Outside Their Own Narrow Discipline, Are Superstitious.

To Imagine Secret Societies And Conspiracy Is A Way Not To React To The Social And Political Life. Because You Say, "we Don't Know Who They Are. We Cannot React Without Reasoning." So It Is A Way To Keep People Far From The Political Environment.

Listening Doesn't Mean Trying To Understand. Anything, However Trifling, May Be Of Use One Day. What Matters Is To Know Something That Others Don't Know You Know.

We Are Formed By Little Scraps Of Wisdom.

Well, Diotallevi And I Are Planning A Reform In Higher Education. A School Of Comparative Irrelevance, Where Useless Or Impossibe Courses Are Given. The School's Aim Is To Turn Out Scholars Capable Of Endlessly Increasing The Number Of Unnecessary Subjects.

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