Top 100 Umberto's Quotes
#1. Umberto Poli was born in Trieste in 1883, when the city was at its zenith as the major port of the Habsburgs. The irredentist sympathies of Umberto's Italian-speaking parents can be detected in their giving him the first name of the Italian emperor.
Susan Stewart
#2. But he is an Italian," was Umberto's sensible reply. "He doesn't care if you break some law a little bit, as long as you wear beautiful shoes. Are you wearing beautiful shoes? Are you wearing the shoes I gave you? ... principessa?"
I looked down at my flip-flops. "I guess I'm toast.
Anne Fortier
#3. Sara loved Nicolo's quiet affection far more than the yearning and lust she saw on Umberto's face.
Mirella Sichirollo Patzer
#4. 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
#5. Joinville's perspective shifts vertically, depending on whether he has fallen from his horse or just remounted.
Umberto Eco
#6. You live on the surface," Lia told me years later. "You sometimes seem profound, but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you try to stand it up.
Umberto Eco
#7. You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
Umberto Eco
#8. I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.
Umberto Eco
#9. The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.
Umberto Eco
#10. 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
#11. The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less
I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and
as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,
without asking too many questions.
Umberto Eco
#12. Two very beautiful naked girls are crouched facing each other. They touch each other sensually, they kiss each other's breasts lightly, with the tip of the tongue.
Umberto Eco
#13. Most of them won't have a book in the house, though, when they have to, they'll talk about the latest book that's selling millions of copies around the world. Our readers may not read books, but they are fascinated by great eccentric painters who sell for billions.
Umberto Eco
#14. I asked him who had put into the crowd's head the idea of attacking the Jews. Salvatore could not remember. I believe that when such crowds collect, lured by a promise and immediately demanding something, there is never any knowing who among them speaks.
Umberto Eco
#15. Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands.
Umberto Eco
#16. 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
#17. With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.
Umberto Eco
#18. It's hopeless," he went on. "We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!"
"We are dwarfs," William admitted, "but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they.
Umberto Eco
#19. I am gripped by an irresistible urge to kill myself, but I know it's the devil tempting me.
Umberto Eco
#20. It's hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.
Umberto Eco
#21. Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
Umberto Eco
#22. Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
Umberto Eco
#23. 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
#24. It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.
Umberto Eco
#25. 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
#26. Here's a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs.
Umberto Eco
#27. 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
#28. As the man said, for every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's wrong.
Umberto Eco
#29. The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it's the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery
Umberto Eco
#30. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.
Umberto Eco
#31. There's the rub. The manifesto doesn't say; it leaves you with your mouth watering. But it was important; so important, it had to remain secret.
Umberto Eco
#32. And in that city Ferrante's rise began, at the outer edge of the Spanish court, where he learned that the virtue of sovereigns is their caprice, and Power is an insatiable monster, to be served with slavish devotion in order to snatch every crumb falling from that table.
Umberto Eco
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
Umberto Eco
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Will we be happier afterwards? Or will be have lost the freshness of those who are privileged to experience art as real life, where we enter after the trumps have been played, and we leave without knowing who's going to win or lose the game?
Umberto Eco
#40. And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight.
Umberto Guidoni
#41. Rather than giving out information someone would be able to check, it's better to limit yourself to insinuation.
Umberto Eco
#42. 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
#43. Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe - with charity - that there is still room for Hope.
Umberto Eco
#44. It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else's house.
Umberto Eco
#45. Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
Umberto Eco
#46. 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
#47. For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of "Is your novel an open work or not?" How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or "With which of your characters do you identify?" For God's sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.
Umberto Eco
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
Umberto Eco
#51. If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.
Umberto Eco
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
Umberto Eco
#57. Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.
Umberto Eco
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.
Umberto Eco
#62. Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.
Umberto Eco
#63. 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
#64. 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
#66. I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.
Umberto Eco
#67. 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
#68. And that will be full knowledge, the learning of the singular.
Umberto Eco
#69. 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
#70. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
Umberto Eco
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?
Umberto Eco
#76. 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
#77. Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
Umberto Eco
#78. 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
#79. Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it.
Umberto Eco
#80. The singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane's dimensions, the triadic beginning of pi, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.
Umberto Eco
#81. Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
Umberto Eco
#82. The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.
Umberto Eco
#83. The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an "anti-library," a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one's personal trove should contain as much of what you don't know as possible. Some
Pamela Paul
#84. It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Umberto Eco
#85. Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.
Umberto Eco
#86. You'll come back To me ... It's written in the stars, you see, you'll come back. You'll come back, it's a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.
Umberto Eco
#87. Hitler's one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohlweltlehre.
Umberto Eco
#89. A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
Umberto Eco
#90. I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
Umberto Eco
#91. Well, we have two major goals. The most important one is to get the station arm on board the station, because that's this really milestone in the space station building since from now on they will be using this arm to continue building the space station.
Umberto Guidoni
#93. Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.
Umberto Eco
#94. 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
#95. It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
Umberto Eco
#96. 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
#97. The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.
Umberto Eco
#98. 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
#99. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come ...
Umberto Eco
#100. I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
Umberto Eco
