Umberto Eco Quotes

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.

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.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.

You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.

That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.

My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.

In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.

He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China.

...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays

If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve" harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

Libraries can take the place of God.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

The followers must feel besieged.

Our most noted satirists are true columnists and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented exposé.

For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").

I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.

Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.

Simple mechanisms do not love.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.

Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.

Sometimes my characters are not myself.

I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.

Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.

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.

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.

My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth.

Not bad, not bad at all, " Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

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

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

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.