The Name Of The Rose

by Umberto Eco

Acute in uncovering, and prudent (if necessary) in covering.

But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.

“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.”

for 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.

They said of him finally that to test his strength of will and his continence he slept with women without having carnal knowledge of them; but when his disciples tried to imitate him, the results were quite different….

Maybe Gandhiji read this book too :)

others that dwell along the river Ganges who live only on the odor of a certain apple, and when they go away from it they die.

What c***

“True,” I said, amazed. 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 treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

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. Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, sô er an ir ufgestigen…. Is that how you say it?”