Umberto Eco quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Umberto Eco on Wise Famous Quotes.

In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

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.

By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something about the world.

I understood it this evening: the author has to die in order for the reader to become aware of his truth.

Palladism. Then I came to Paris. Maybe they wanted to

The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

We like lists because we don't want to die.

Adso of Melk: The Koran, the Bible of the infidels, a perverse book ...
William of Baskerville: A book containing a wisdom different from ours.

In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.

Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

Rather than giving out information someone would be able to check, it's better to limit yourself to insinuation.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

A complicit mustiness hung in the air, the odour of silence and calm.

He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.

With Germans, as with women, you never get to the point.

when a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm. We must act as if we had eternity before us.

Often the step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is very brief,

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.

Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.

Art is a serious matter

We live inside a hollow earth, enclosed by the terrestrial surface. Hitler realized this.

Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.

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.

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.

Neutral territory, therefore, this abbey where the two groups could meet.

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

It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating ...

What's that got to do with anything?

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.

Translation is the art of failure.

My boy, this is the second time today that wisdom has spoken through your mouth ... !

They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.

If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

Books always speak of other books.

But chance has a taste for conspiracy.

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.

I am gripped by an irresistible urge to kill myself, but I know it's the devil tempting me.

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.

It is always better when the person who frightens us is also afraid of us.

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

The person who doesn't read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.

When nature fails, we turn to art.

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

When a spy sells something entirely new, all he needs to do is recount something you could find in any second-hand book stall.

someone has mixed and shuffled the words of the Book more than was right.

Luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.

The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it's the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

So it is best for you to withdraw into the world of your portents, for there at least you can decide yourself how portentous they are.

The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief

The followers must feel besieged.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

A scoundrel is an evil heliotrope turning always in the direction of the most powerful.

It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.

Graecum est, non legitur," I finished his sentence, humiliated. "It is Greek to me." "Exactly;

But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.

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.

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.

Three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works.

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by
the often perverse wisdom of man!

What model reader did I want as i was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game.

In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.

when the soul is transported, the only virtue lies in loving what you see (is that not true?), the supreme happiness in having what you have;

No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit.

The grandeur of Jerusalem is also ... its problem.

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

As Clark Kent I take care of misunderstood young geniuses; as Superman I punish justly misunderstood old geniuses. I

So we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.

For what I was to see at the abbey would make me think that it is often inquisitors who create heretics.

Recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book ...

Is this possible? To spend a life punishing people who will never know they have been punished? So

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

Joinville's perspective shifts vertically, depending on whether he has fallen from his horse or just remounted.

Human beings are religious animals.

Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

Anything was possible if the impossible was true.

Does it make sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convince yourself that you would have chosen the right one - had you had the Opportunity? I

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?