Top 391 Quotes & Sayings by Umberto Eco - Page 3

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.

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

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

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

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.

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

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.

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.

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.

You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don't love someone for your whole life - that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends ... But you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he's always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.

The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

To survive, you must tell stories.

Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

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.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.

We live for books.

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

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.

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.

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.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

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.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake.

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

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.

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.

The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.

When your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell - in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

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.

The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.

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.

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.

Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.

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.

Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom

Books always speak of other books.

I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.

Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

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.

I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.

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.

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.