Umberto Eco Quotes

El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.

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

Then why do you want to know?""Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

…the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.

Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

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

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

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...

The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.

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.

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.

Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoonthat is better than a spoon

the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved

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

The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.

The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them, colorless green ideas slepp furiously.

After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.

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

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.

But chance has a taste for conspiracy.

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

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

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

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

Our life is full of empty space.

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

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