Umberto Eco > Quotes

“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.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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

“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 real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

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

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco

“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...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”
― Umberto Eco

“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: 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

“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

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“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

“When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.”
― Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

“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

“What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?”
― Umberto Eco, Baudolino

“We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Sometimes I look a the Moon, and I imagine that those darker spots are caverns, cities, islands, and the places that shine are those where the sea catches the light of the sun like the glass of a mirror...I would like to tell of war and friendship among the various parts of the body, the arms that do battle with the feet, and the veins that make love with the arteries or the bones with the marrow. 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, the little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful'.”
― Umberto Eco

“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Love is wiser than wisdom.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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

“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

“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

“Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely. ”
― Umberto Eco

“As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“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

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics…Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble…Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation…Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent…Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says that all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, therefore cats bark…Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason…A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. 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…There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“...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

“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

“It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“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

“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.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“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

“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.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“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

“Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“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

“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

“I felt like poisoning a monk.”
― Umberto Eco, PostScript to the Name of the Rose

“I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”
― Umberto Eco, PostScript to the Name of the Rose

“Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“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, 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

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