Top 391 Quotes & Sayings by Umberto Eco - Page 7

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.

I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays

Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.

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

I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.

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

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

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.

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!").

Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.

Our most noted satirists are true columnists and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented exposé.

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.

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.

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

I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.

Sometimes my characters are not myself.

He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.

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.

"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."

The followers must feel besieged.

But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.

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.

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

...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

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.

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.

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.

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.

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth.