Umberto Eco OMRI (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault’s Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
Umberto Eco Quotes
1. “We live for books.”
— Umberto Eco
2. “To survive, you must tell stories.”
— Umberto Eco
3. “Translation is the art of failure.”
— Umberto Eco
4. “Love is wiser than wisdom.”
— Umberto Eco
5. “As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”
— Umberto Eco
6. “A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.”
— Umberto Eco
7. “What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?”
— Umberto Eco
8. “I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.”
— Umberto Eco
9. “I write what I write.”
— Umberto Eco
10. “Beauty is boring because it is predictable.”
— Umberto Eco
11. “Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.”
— Umberto Eco
12. “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community… but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”
— Umberto Eco
13. “All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.”
— Umberto Eco
14. “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
15. “When your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies.”
— Umberto Eco
16. “The good of a book lies in its being read.”
— Umberto Eco
17. “The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.”
— Umberto Eco
18. “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
19. “I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.”
— Umberto Eco
20. “There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”
— Umberto Eco
21. “There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.”
— Umberto Eco
22. “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
23. “Listening doesn’t mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don’t know you know.”
— Umberto Eco
24. “Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”
— Umberto Eco
25. “If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.”
— Umberto Eco
26. “National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.”
— Umberto Eco
27. “Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.”
— Umberto Eco
28. “Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.”
— Umberto Eco
29. “The truth is an anagram of an anagram.”
— Umberto Eco
30. “But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.”
— Umberto Eco
31. “You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.”
— Umberto Eco
32. “Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.”
— Umberto Eco
33. “I don’t know, maybe we’re always looking for the right place, maybe it’s within reach, but we don’t recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.”
— Umberto Eco
34. “The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.”
— Umberto Eco
35. “The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.”
— Umberto Eco
36. “A library’s ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste’s stall, a place for trouvailles.”
— Umberto Eco
37. “The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything – reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?”
— Umberto Eco
38. “When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”
— Umberto Eco
39. “Books always speak of other books.”
— Umberto Eco
40. “The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come…”
— Umberto Eco
41. “Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything.”
— Umberto Eco
42. “A secret is powerful when it is empty.”
— Umberto Eco
43. “Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.”
— Umberto Eco
44. “I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.”
— Umberto Eco
45. “The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.”
— Umberto Eco
46. “I felt like poisoning a monk.”
— Umberto Eco
47. “We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.”
— Umberto Eco
48. “A secret is powerful when it is empty. People often mention the “Masonic secret.” What on earth is the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.”
— Umberto Eco
49. “Ma gavte la nata.”
— Umberto Eco
50. “A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection – not an invitation for hypnosis.”
— Umberto Eco
51. “We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.”
— Umberto Eco
52. “A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”
— Umberto Eco
53. “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
— Umberto Eco
54. “To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.”
— Umberto Eco
55. “The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.”
— Umberto Eco
56. “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
— Umberto Eco
57. “You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.”
— Umberto Eco
58. “The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
— Umberto Eco
59. “I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.”
— Umberto Eco
60. “A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.”
— Umberto Eco
61. “In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.”
— Umberto Eco
62. “How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!”
— Umberto Eco
63. “A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.”
— Umberto Eco
64. “For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.”
— Umberto Eco
65. “The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.”
— Umberto Eco
66. “Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”
— Umberto Eco
67. “Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.”
— Umberto Eco
68. “A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.”
— Umberto Eco
69. “It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.”
— Umberto Eco
70. “It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one’s own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.”
— Umberto Eco
71. “It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.”
— Umberto Eco
72. “A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.”
— Umberto Eco
73. “When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.”
— Umberto Eco
74. “I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.”
— Umberto Eco
75. “Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.”
— Umberto Eco
76. “Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it’s more amusing – ugliness – than beauty.”
— Umberto Eco
78. “Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.”
— Umberto Eco
79. “The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.”
— Umberto Eco
80. “Yesterday’s rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.”
— Umberto Eco
81. “You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.”
— Umberto Eco
82. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.”
— Umberto Eco
83. “Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.”
— Umberto Eco
84. “The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.”
— Umberto Eco
85. “Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t exist. It’s the permutations that matter.”
— Umberto Eco
86. “Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.”
— Umberto Eco
87. “Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.”
— Umberto Eco
88. “There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.”
— Umberto Eco
89. “The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell – in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.”
— Umberto Eco
90. “Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.”
— Umberto Eco
91. “All the theories of conspiracy were always a way to escape our responsibilities. It is a very important kind of social sickness by which we avoid recognizing reality such as it is and avoid our responsibilities.”
— Umberto Eco
92. “How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.”
— Umberto Eco
93. “Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.”
— Umberto Eco
94. “I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.”
— Umberto Eco
95. “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
96. “If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.”
— Umberto Eco
97. “Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”
— Umberto Eco
98. “Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.”
— Umberto Eco
99. “The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.”
— Umberto Eco
100. “We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.”
— Umberto Eco
101. “By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.”
— Umberto Eco
102. “Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.”
— Umberto Eco
103. “When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.”
— Umberto Eco
104. “He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.”
— Umberto Eco
105. “They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on. Civilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen on the last priest, and the earth is rid of that evil lot.”
— Umberto Eco
106. “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
107. “Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.”
— Umberto Eco
108. “The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”
— Umberto Eco
109. “People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”
— Umberto Eco
110. “Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
— Umberto Eco
111. “Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats.”
— Umberto Eco
112. “Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I’m involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.”
— Umberto Eco
113. “Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.”
— Umberto Eco
114. “An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d’Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it’s an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege.”
— Umberto Eco
115. “He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.”
— Umberto Eco
116. “As Clark Kent I take care of misunderstood young geniuses; as Superman I punish justly misunderstood old geniuses. I.”
— Umberto Eco
117. “Therefore you don’t have a single answer to your questions?” “Adso, if I did I would teach theology in Paris.” “In Paris do they always have the true answer?” “Never,” William said, “but they are very sure of their errors.”
— Umberto Eco
118. “Libraries can take the place of God.”
— Umberto Eco
119. “I know nothing. There is nothing that I know. But the heart senses certain things. Let your heart speak, question faces, do not listen to tongues.”
— Umberto Eco
120. “At a certain historical moment, some people found the suspicion that the sun did not revolve around the earth just as crazy and deplorable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist. So we would be wise to keep an open, fresh mind against the moment when the community of scientists decrees that the idea of the universe has been an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians. After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.”
— Umberto Eco
121. “I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
— Umberto Eco
122. “American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC.”
— Umberto Eco
123. “Yes, I know, it’s not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.”
— Umberto Eco
124. “Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.”
— Umberto Eco
125. “All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.”
— Umberto Eco
126. “Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.”
— Umberto Eco
127. “Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.”
— Umberto Eco
128. “Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.”
— Umberto Eco
129. “We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don’t know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us – but is living close to us.”
— Umberto Eco
130. “The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”
— Umberto Eco
131. “One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.”
— Umberto Eco
132. “What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.”
— Umberto Eco
133. “That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.”
— Umberto Eco
134. “But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.”
— Umberto Eco
135. “The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.”
— Umberto Eco
136. “Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.”
— Umberto Eco
137. “My collection of rare books concerns only books that don’t tell the truth.”
— Umberto Eco
138. “I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.”
— Umberto Eco
139. “The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.”
— Umberto Eco
140. “Simple mechanisms do not love.”
— Umberto Eco
141. “The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.”
— Umberto Eco
142. “Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.”
— Umberto Eco
143. “I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare’s tragedies.”
— Umberto Eco
144. “Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.”
— Umberto Eco
145. “The followers must feel besieged.”
— Umberto Eco
146. “In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.”
— Umberto Eco
147. “It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.”
— Umberto Eco
148. “The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.”
— Umberto Eco
149. “Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.”
— Umberto Eco
150. “My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.”
— Umberto Eco
151. “We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.”
— Umberto Eco
152. “The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.”
— Umberto Eco
153. “The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn’t exist.”
— Umberto Eco
154. “It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.”
— Umberto Eco
155. “In other words, although I don’t like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.”
— Umberto Eco
156. “To establish what is true is very difficult. Frequently it is easier to establish what is false. And, passing through the false, it’s possible to understand something about truth.”
— Umberto Eco
157. “Man’s principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?”
— Umberto Eco
158. “All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”
— Umberto Eco
159. “Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.”
— Umberto Eco
160. “The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.”
— Umberto Eco
161. “I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays.”
— Umberto Eco
162. “How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.”
— Umberto Eco
163. “Omnia mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum.”
— Umberto Eco
164. “The Templars realized that the secret lay not only in possessing the global map of the currents, but also in knowing the critical point, the Omphalos, the Umbilicus Telluris, the Navel of the World, the Source of Command.”
— Umberto Eco
165. “If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible. – Talmud, Berakhot, 6.”
— Umberto Eco
166. “What does the philosopher say? Odi ergo sum. I hate therefore I am.”
— Umberto Eco
167. “I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.”
— Umberto Eco
168. “But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery.”
— Umberto Eco
169. “Having reached the end of my poor sinner’s life, my hair now white, I grow old as the world does, waiting to be lost in the bottomless pit of silent and deserted divinity, sharing in the light of angelic intelligences;.”
— Umberto Eco
170. “In this universe of ours, with its wealth of errors and legends, historical data and false information, one absolute truth is the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. All the rest is always open to debate.”
— Umberto Eco
171. “Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy?”
— Umberto Eco
172. “The “thesis neurosis” has begun: the student abandons the thesis, returns to it, feels unfulfilled, loses focus, and uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life that he is too cowardly to address. This student will never graduate.”
— Umberto Eco
173. “I’m always fascinated by losers. Also, in my “Foucault’s Pendulum,” the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.”
— Umberto Eco
174. “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
— Umberto Eco
175. “Hitler’s one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohlweltlehre.”
— Umberto Eco
176. “Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.”
— Umberto Eco
177. “I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.”
— Umberto Eco
178. “If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.”
— Umberto Eco
179. “Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”
— Umberto Eco
180. “It’s not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.”
— Umberto Eco
181. “We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
— Umberto Eco
182. “A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars.”
— Umberto Eco
183. “There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read.”
— Umberto Eco
184. “During the day you will approach the frog several times and will utter words of worship. And you will ask it to work the miracles you wish… Meanwhile you will cut a cross on which to sacrifice it. – From a ritual of Aleister Crowley.”
— Umberto Eco
185. “The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.”
— Umberto Eco
186. “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.”
— Umberto Eco
187. “I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.”
— Umberto Eco
188. “If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.”
— Umberto Eco
189. “As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.”
— Umberto Eco
190. “Nebulat ergo cogito.”
— Umberto Eco
191. “The visitor enters and says, “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?”… The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: “And more, dear sir, many more,” which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: “No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.”
— Umberto Eco
192. “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
193. “To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, “We don’t know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning.” So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment.”
— Umberto Eco
194. “For architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called “kosmos,” that is to say ornate, since it is like a great animal on whom there shine the perfection and the proportion of all its members. And praised be our Creator who, as the Scriptures say, has decreed all things in number, weight, and measure.”
— Umberto Eco
195. “I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.”
— Umberto Eco
196. “The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.”
— Umberto Eco
197. “Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.”
— Umberto Eco
198. “True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”
— Umberto Eco
199. “When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.”
— Umberto Eco
200. “The most interesting letters I received about ‘The Name of the Rose’ were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn’t understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.”
— Umberto Eco
