Top 100 Umberto Eco Quotes
#1. But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?
Umberto Eco
#2. Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.
Umberto Eco
#3. I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
Umberto Eco
#4. Eight, the number of perfection for every tetragon; four, the number of the Gospels; five, the number of the zones of the world; seven, the number of the gifts of the Holy Ghost.
Umberto Eco
#5. 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
#6. The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.
Umberto Eco
#7. If you accuse a man of murder, you might be believed, but if you accuse him of eating children for lunch and dinner like Gilles de Rais, no one will take you seriously.
Umberto Eco
#8. I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.
Umberto Eco
#9. 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
#11. They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.
Umberto Eco
#12. Dreams of flying have haunted the collective imagination since time immemorial.
Umberto Eco
#13. 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
#14. I seal that
which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
Umberto Eco
#15. Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.
Umberto Eco
#16. ...interested in everything and nothing else
Umberto Eco
#17. 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
#18. The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
Umberto Eco
#19. Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
Umberto Eco
#20. The book is like the wheel - once invented, it cannot be bettered.
Umberto Eco
#21. When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
Umberto Eco
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.
Umberto Eco
#25. And from this springs the extraordinary question: Did the Egyptians know about electricity?
Umberto Eco
#26. 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
#27. It seems to me that more plots have been imagined than really exist.
Umberto Eco
#28. One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
Umberto Eco
#29. The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.
Umberto Eco
#30. For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color.
- William
Umberto Eco
#31. In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form
Umberto Eco
#32. Are there not moments," he asked William, "when you would also do shameful things to get your hands on a book you have been seeking for years?
Umberto Eco
#33. Three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color.
Umberto Eco
#34. It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
Umberto Eco
#35. What did I really think fifteen years ago? 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.
Umberto Eco
#36. 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
#37. From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola
Umberto Eco
#38. Hitler's one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohlweltlehre.
Umberto Eco
#39. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something about the world.
Umberto Eco
#40. The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: "Who is in his place?" - Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge,
Umberto Eco
#41. You too will seek your fortune, and you must be keen in obtaining it. If here you have learned to dodge a musket ball, there you must learn to elude envy, jealousy, greed, using those same weapons to combat your adversaries, namely, everyone.
Umberto Eco
#42. Sometimes my characters are not myself.
Umberto Eco
#43. 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
#44. 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
#46. I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
Umberto Eco
#47. Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
Umberto Eco
#48. I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.
Umberto Eco
#49. Joinville's perspective shifts vertically, depending on whether he has fallen from his horse or just remounted.
Umberto Eco
#50. All the world's follies," he replied, "turn up in publishing houses sooner or later. But the world's follies may also contain flashes of the wisdom of the Most High, so the wise man observes folly with humility." Then
Umberto Eco
#51. 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
#52. But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
Umberto Eco
#53. There are words that give power, others that make us all the more derelict,
Umberto Eco
#55. It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.
Umberto Eco
#56. When your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are.
Umberto Eco
#57. I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But 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
#58. Those whom you cannot love you should, rather, fear.
Umberto Eco
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Luther, he ruined the bible by translating it into their own language.
Umberto Eco
#62. I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources
Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
Umberto Eco
#63. Vespers In which the rest of the abbey is visited, William comes to some conclusions about Adelmo's death, there is a conversation with the brother glazier about glasses for reading and about phantoms for those who seek to read too much. At
Umberto Eco
#64. The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved
Umberto Eco
#65. 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
#66. My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
Umberto Eco
#67. 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
#68. If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.
Umberto Eco
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
Umberto Eco
#72. Recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book ...
Umberto Eco
#73. He was still there when, having seen history now as a place rich in whims and incomprehensible plots for Reasons of State, he learned from Saint-Savin how treacherous was the great machine of the world, plagued by the iniquities of Chance.
Umberto Eco
#74. 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
#76. Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.
Umberto Eco
#77. Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country
Umberto Eco
#78. And he continues: Thus it is increasingly necessary you recognize that other congregations of material bodies exist elsewhere in the universe, like this of our world, which the ether encircles in eager embrace
Umberto Eco
#79. 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
#80. My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.
Umberto Eco
#81. And I loved the girl precisely because she existed, and I was happy, not envious, that she existed.
Umberto Eco
#82. My boy, this is the second time today that wisdom has spoken through your mouth ... !
Umberto Eco
#83. I believe also that often the Evil One works through second causes. And I know that he can impel his victims to do evil in such a way that the blame falls on a righteous man, and the Evil One rejoices then as the righteous man is burned in the place of his succubus.
Umberto Eco
#84. One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view.
Umberto Eco
#85. 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
#86. How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by
the often perverse wisdom of man!
Umberto Eco
#87. Rather than giving out information someone would be able to check, it's better to limit yourself to insinuation.
Umberto Eco
#88. With Germans, as with women, you never get to the point.
Umberto Eco
#89. But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.
Umberto Eco
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Today I realize that many recent exercises in "deconstructive reading" read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.
Umberto Eco
#93. But I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
Umberto Eco
#94. I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he's almost always a lunatic.
Umberto Eco
#95. 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
#96. I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
Umberto Eco
#97. When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
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#98. And if it is possible that creatures live underwater, could not creatures also live under the earth, nations of salamanders capable of arriving, through their tunnels, at the central fire that animates the planet?
Umberto Eco
#99. The simple are meat for slaughter, to be used when they are useful in causing trouble for the opposing power, and to be sacrificed when they are no longer of use.
Umberto Eco
#100. When you go from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real one, where the captain of the paddle-wheel steamer says it is possible to see alligators on the banks of the river, and then you don't see any, you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland.
-'City of Robots',1986
Umberto Eco
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