Umberto Eco Quotes

Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.

Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and...

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: th...

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembe...

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

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse th...

The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in ...

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made ter...

The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tact...

The excluded when on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true leper are only the illustration...

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is goo...

Our life is full of empty space.

We live for books.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we...

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television.

Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the ...

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feeling...

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these ...

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap...

The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is th...

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with...

Translation is the art of failure.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

The comic is the perception of the opposite humor is the feeling of it.

He is always on the brink of suicide... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas sugg...

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their o...

Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he w...

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not...

I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yo...

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are no...

A conversation between Adso and William -You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition wo...

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer,the wheel. Once invented it cannot be improved. You...

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity ...

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in lif...

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If s...

There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I dev...

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the gre...

I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world t...

Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one lo...

Is there a notion of hope (and of our responsibility to the future) that could be shared by believer...

The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of d...

... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scen...

The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by...

But chance has a taste for conspiracy.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't ...

Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevanc...

It’s quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education.

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!

Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion t...

We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external ene...

Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstru...

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

Jacopo, while I could still read, during these past months, I read dictionaries, I studied histories...

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

…the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if thing...

Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; i...

You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite you...

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment ...

Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter o...

The taxi driver is someone who spends all day driving in city traffic (an activity that provokes eit...

What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves?

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. ...

Die Menschen tun das Böse nie so vollständig und begeistert, wie wenn sie es aus religiöser Überzeug...

Atât de mare e puterea adevărului care, precum binele, se răspândește de la sine.

It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.

I'd lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there's always someone behind our ba...

The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you...

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened...

So, Colonna, please demonstrate to our friends how it's possible to respect, or appear to respect, o...

To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to ...

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is...

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell...

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rule...

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the ...

I felt like poisoning a monk.

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoop...

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opp...

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to...

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a...

The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their con...

After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the q...

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always ...

It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-sto...

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respirat...

the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most ...

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recogniz...

Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and t...

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it prope...

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are...

And in that moment I experience a revelation.I realize now that it was a painful sense that the worl...

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others di...

In the years when I discoverd the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one sho...

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most lovi...