Umberto Eco Quotes

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

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.

In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.

Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

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.

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.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

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

A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country

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

Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.

The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.

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.

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.

I write what I write.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.

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

Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.

We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.

"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.

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

It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating.

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.

Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

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

Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.

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.

I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.

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

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.

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.

It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.

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.

The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.

If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.

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