Umberto Eco Quotes

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.

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

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.

The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats.

Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.

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

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.

A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.

Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.

New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing."

Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

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

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

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

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.

Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.

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.

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.

The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.

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.

By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.

There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

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

Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said

In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.

Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.

Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.