Umberto D Quotes

#1. I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief.

Vittorio De Sica

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

Umberto Eco

#3. 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

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

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Love forbids you not to love.

Umberto Giordano

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

Umberto Eco

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Umberto Eco

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

#18. I'd lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there's always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us.

Umberto Eco

#19. I'd never understood whether the vogue for apologising is a sign of humility of impudence: you do something you shouldn't have done, then you apologise and wash your hands of it.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

#21. 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

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

Umberto Eco

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Umberto Eco

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Umberto Eco

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco