Top 100 Quotes About Umberto Eco

#1. Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

Umberto Eco

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#2. But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?

Umberto Eco

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#3. 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

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#4. The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?

Umberto Eco

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#5. I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.

Deborah Harkness

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#6. The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.

Umberto Eco

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#7. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

Umberto Eco

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#8. 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

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#9. And that will be full knowledge, the learning of the singular.

Umberto Eco

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#10. He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open.

Umberto Eco

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#11. I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.

Umberto Eco

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#12. The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.

Umberto Eco

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#13. 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

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#14. when the soul is transported, the only virtue lies in loving what you see (is that not true?), the supreme happiness in having what you have;

Umberto Eco

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#15. Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.

Umberto Eco

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#16. Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.

Umberto Eco

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#17. There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr.

Umberto Eco

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#18. 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

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#19. He is always on the brink of suicide ... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives.

Umberto Eco

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#20. Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.

Umberto Eco

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#21. Luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.

Umberto Eco

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#22. 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

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#23. Boethius says, nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn;

Umberto Eco

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#24. The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

Umberto Eco

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#25. I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

Umberto Eco

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#26. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come ...

Umberto Eco

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#27. The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn't know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn't know that a few seconds before winning I wasn't sure I wouldn't lose.

Umberto Eco

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#28. The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.

Umberto Eco

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#29. 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

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#30. 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

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#31. It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

Umberto Eco

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#32. We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

Umberto Eco

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#33. I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.

Umberto Eco

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#34. 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

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#35. And I said to him when you learn to read then you learn everything you didnt know before. But when you write you write only what you know allready so patientia Im better off not knowing how to write because the ass is the ass

Umberto Eco

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#36. When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.

Umberto Eco

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#37. 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

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#38. 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

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#39. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

Umberto Eco

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#40. He fell in love with his golem, found it a source of consolation. Life

Umberto Eco

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#41. I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

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#43. A daily newspaper is destined to become like a weekly magazine. We'll be talking about what might happen tomorrow, with feature articles, investigative supplements, unexpected predictions ...

Umberto Eco

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#44. How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

Umberto Eco

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#45. We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

Umberto Eco

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#46. Crisis sells well.

Umberto Eco

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#47. For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

Umberto Eco

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#48. The ways of the Antichrist are slow and tortuous. He arrives when we do not expect him: not because the calculation suggested by the apostle was mistaken, but because we have not learned the art.

Umberto Eco

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#49. marginalia we were discussing today,

Umberto Eco

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#50. If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.

Umberto Eco

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#51. They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.

Umberto Eco

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#52. The followers must feel besieged.

Umberto Eco

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#53. We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

Umberto Eco

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#54. 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

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#55. 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

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#56. Often books speak of books.

Umberto Eco

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#57. Dreams of flying have haunted the collective imagination since time immemorial.

Umberto Eco

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#58. 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

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#59. Impassioned in his gesticulation, his voice persuasive, his smile fascinating, his reasoning clear and consequential, he held his listeners fast for all the time he spoke. He

Umberto Eco

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#60. I seal that
which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.

Umberto Eco

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#61. The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.

Umberto Eco

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#62. 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. Jorge did

Umberto Eco

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#63. 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

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#64. What does the philosopher say? Odi ergo sum. I hate therefore I am.

Umberto Eco

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#65. I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

Umberto Eco

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#66. William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound.

Umberto Eco

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#67. I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

Umberto Eco

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#68. ...interested in everything and nothing else

Umberto Eco

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#69. He had perhaps seen fifty springs and was therefore already very old, but his tireless body moved with an agility I myself often lacked.

Umberto Eco

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#70. 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.

Umberto Eco

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#71. Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how.

Umberto Eco

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#72. 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

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#73. How beautiful the world is, and how ugly labyrinths are,' I said, relieved.
'How beautiful the world would be if there was a procedure for moving through labyrinths,' my master replied.

Umberto Eco

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#74. 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

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#75. When one has a text to question, it is irrelevant to ask the author.

Umberto Eco

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#76. What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.

Umberto Eco

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#77. I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing.

Umberto Eco

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#78. I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.

Umberto Eco

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#79. Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

Umberto Eco

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#80. When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.

Umberto Eco

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#81. When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

Umberto Eco

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#82. The book is like the wheel - once invented, it cannot be bettered.

Umberto Eco

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#83. For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines
some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege
I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words ...

Umberto Eco

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#84. 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

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#85. There are only four questions of importance in life: What is sacred, of what is the spirit made, what is worth living for, and what is worth dying for. The answer to all of them is the same. Only LOVE.

Umberto Eco

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#86. When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

Umberto Eco

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#87. 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

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#88. 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

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#89. Classical mythology is a catalogue of indescribable cruelty: [ ... ] It is a world dominated by evil, where even the most beautiful beings carry out atrocities.

Umberto Eco

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#90. 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

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#91. An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

Umberto Eco

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#92. Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don't like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don't like it.

Umberto Eco

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#93. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance.

Umberto Eco

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#94. The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.

Umberto Eco

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#95. Characters migrate

Umberto Eco

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#96. 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

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#97. What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

Umberto Eco

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#98. The book has to give the idea of another kind of newspaper, has to show how I labored away for a year to create a model of journalism independent of all pressure, implying that the venture failed because it was impossible to have a free voice

Umberto Eco

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#99. Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

Umberto Eco

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#100. 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

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