Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

I felt the need to urinate. Ignore it: a nervous reaction.

This is better than real memory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns to remember but not to forget.

Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.

I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.

A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can’t hurt, and you might get better.

I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote “I am that I am,” for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

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

“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.”

In such statements you suspect that something’s wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism.

And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons.

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.

The king is so badly racked by dysentery that he cuts out the seat of his pants to save time in battle.

The acts of stupidity were the most obvious, and, because they were inexplicable, they generally coincided with the enigmas.

If you fail to have an erection the first time, you’re impotent for the rest of your life.

I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.

You can be fascinated even by a tree frog if you watch it long enough.

For that matter, I never managed to figure out Brazilian names. They defy all onomastic dictionaries, and exist only in Brazil.

It was also the day I began to let myself be lulled by feelings of resemblance: the notion that everything might be mysteriously related to everything else.

To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don’t believe in it, you accept its spells.

I am from an age when one would have accepted damnation to pay homage to beauty.

“But what do they want people to know?” “Only that there’s a secret. Otherwise, if everything is as it appears to be, why go on living?”

I decided to invent a job for myself.

There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.

A new love is a good reason for going back to drink.

“Those things aren’t sins anymore; I can do anything I like. Once you’ve freed yourself from the flesh, you’re beyond good and evil.”

“My answer: There exists a secret society with branches throughout the world, and its plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists.”

“Yes. Mankind can’t endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found—God, angels, devils. Synarchy performs the same function on a lesser scale.”

First, I was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half, and a girl thirteen and a half is already a woman; a boy at thirteen is a snot-nose kid.

Fire keeps you warm and cold gives you bronchial pneumonia, especially if you’re a scholar four thousand years ago, and therefore fire has mysterious virtues besides its ability to cook your chicken.

The easiest way to return from where you’ve been without retracing your steps is to walk in a circle. The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that’s why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it’s hard to represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus.

Anyway, that’s how we’re put together, all of us, and that’s why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally they all resemble one another. Thus you see that people with a brain in their head, if they’re shown an alchemist’s oven, all shut up and warm inside, think of the belly of the mama making a baby, and only your Diabolicals think that the Madonna about to have the Child is a reference to the alchemist’s oven.

Esotericism is the search for a learning transmitted only through symbols, closed to the profane.

“To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.”

I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted.

Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is—or at least the world as it will become.

When religion fails, art provides.

Invent, invent wildly, paying no attention to connections, till it becomes impossible to summarize.

The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel.

If you’re a sexual maniac, you don’t want sex; you want the excitement of its theft, you want the victim’s resistance and despair. If sex is handed to you on a platter, here it is, go to it, naturally you’re not interested, otherwise what sort of sexual maniac would you be?

Everyone has written poems in adolescence; true poets destroy them, bad poets publish them.

Going to use this next time I review a bad celebrity poetry book.