Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

The problem with suicide is that sometimes you jump out the window and then change your mind between the eighth floor and the seventh.

But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.

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.

had crossed that Rubicon;

My father said this to me.

There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”

Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”

How can life be so bountiful, providing such sublime rewards for mediocrity?

The crusades were carried out in virtuous bad faith.

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.

“Plenty. I see here that he belonged to a Rosicrucian society that was called Stella Matutina.”

Now, from apex to base, the volume of the Great Pyramid in cubic inches is approximately 161,000,000,000. How many human souls, then, have lived on the earth from Adam to the present day? Somewhere between 153,000,000,000 and 171,900,000,000. —Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, London, Isbister, 1880, p. 583

Isn’t it said that history is a bloodstained and senseless riddle?

True esotericism does not fear contradiction.”

“The moral of the story?” “Who said stories have to have a moral? But, now that I think about it, maybe the moral is that sometimes, to prove something, you have to die.”

Do not fear the darkness; it does not threaten, but protects us.”

I understood it this evening: the author has to die in order for the reader to become aware of his truth.