"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything."
— Umberto Eco

"We live for books."
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"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. "
— Umberto Eco

"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."
— Umberto Eco (Postscript to the Name of the Rose)

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

"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else"
— Umberto Eco

"What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?"
— Umberto Eco (Baudolino)

"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."
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"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."
— Umberto Eco (Postscript to the Name of the Rose)

"Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the moutains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away."
— Umberto Eco (Postscript to the Name of the Rose)

"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."
— Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulum)

"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."
— Umberto Eco (Postscript to the Name of the Rose)

"We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry."
— Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulum)

"The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless."
— Umberto Eco

"When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance."
— Umberto Eco (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana)

"A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams."
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"I love the smell of book ink in the morning."
— Umberto Eco

"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."
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose: Including Postscript)

"I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed."
— Umberto Eco

"Love is wiser than wisdom."
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows 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". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence."
— Umberto Eco

"Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity."
— Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before)

"Books are not meant to be believed, bu to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means..."
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed."
— Umberto Eco (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana)

"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."
— Umberto Eco

"penitenziagite! watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! death is super nos! pray the santo pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! ha ha, you like this negromanzia de domini nostri jesu christi! et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors...cave el diabolo! semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. but salvatore is not stupidus! bonum monsasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. and the resto is not worth merda. amen. no?"
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"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."
— Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulum)

"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."
— Umberto Eco

"The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text."
— Umberto Eco (Postscript to the Name of the Rose)

"If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things."
— Umberto Eco

"This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain."
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open. "
— Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before)

"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."
— Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before)

"...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."
— Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before)

""Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a proceedure for moving through labyrinths." -Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose"
— Umberto Eco

"Dios ha muerto, el arte dejó de existir, la historia ha llegado a su fin, y yo mismo no me siento del todo bien."
— Umberto Eco

"All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them."
— Umberto Eco

"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."
— Umberto Eco

"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. "
— Umberto Eco

""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.""
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene."
— Umberto Eco (Five Moral Pieces)

"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."
— Umberto Eco

"It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house."
— Umberto Eco (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana)

"...It would hardly be a waste of time if sometimes even the most advanced students in the cognitive sciences were to pay a visit to their ancestors. It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a painter without having ever seen a single work by Raphael, or a writer without having ever read the classics. Such things are theoretically possible; but the 'primitive' artist, condemned to an ignorance of the past, is always recognizable as such and rightly labeled as naïf. It is only when we consider past projects revealed as utopian or as failures that we are apprised of the dangers and possibilities for failure for our allegedly new projects. The study of the deeds of our ancestors is thus more than an atiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution."
— Umberto Eco (The Search for the Perfect Language)

"Hay cosas que ves venir, no es que te enamores porque te enamoras, te enamoras porque en ese período tenías una desesperada necesidad de enamorarte. En los períodos en que tienes ganas de enamorarte debes fijarte bien dónde te metes: como haber bebido un filtro, de esos que hacen que uno se enamore del primero que pasa. Podría ser un ornitorrinco."
— Umberto Eco (El Pendulo de Foucault)

""“Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.”" - "
— Umberto Eco

"Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want."
— Umberto Eco

"El alma humana es la verdadera cópula del mundo porque, por un lado, se dirige hacia lo divino y, por el otro, se introduce en el cuerpo y domina la naturaleza."
— Umberto Eco (Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages)

"Todo concepto filosófico, tomado en su sentido más genérico, explica cualquier cosa."
— Umberto Eco (Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages)

"Hoy en día no nos damos cuenta que la cualidad única de una obra de arte no hay que buscarla en una idea concebida por acto de gracia e independiente de la experiencia de la naturaleza: en el arte convergen todas nuestras experiencias vividas, elaboradas y resumidas según los normales procesos imaginativos, salvo que lo que hace única la obra es el modo en el que esta elaboración se vuelve concreta y se ofrece a la percepción, a través de un proceso de interacción entre experiencia vivida, voluntad de arte y legalidad autónoma del material sobre el que se trabaja."
— Umberto Eco (Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages)