Top 391 Quotes & Sayings by Umberto Eco
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Italian novelist Umberto Eco.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
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.
Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
Translation is the art of failure.
Libraries can take the place of God.
Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
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.
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.
Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
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.
I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
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.
If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
Our life is full of empty space.
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.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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.
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.
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
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.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
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.
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.
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.
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.
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
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.
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.
Beauty is boring because it is predictable.
Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
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.
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.
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
A secret is powerful when it is empty.
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.
Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
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.
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.
Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
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