Umberto Eco Quotes

Amparo was conquered, and I felt a twinge of jealousy. I

Oh, he can bend even the theologians to his will," Michael said sadly. "Not necessarily," William replied. "We live in times when those learned in divine things have no fear of proclaiming the Pope a heretic. Those learned in divine things are in their way the voice of the Christian people. Not even the Pope can set himself against them now.

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.

Idiot. Above her head was the only stable point in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business. A moment later the couple went off
he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter
their first and last encounter
with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100
degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad
stations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an American
percolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes,
served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like pure
spring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cup
contains more caffeine than four espressos.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one's free to take it and run with it. At the end, they'll see who's done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much: Mark isn't bad, just a little sloppy: Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what's happening, it's too late, Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty ... It all goes to Peter's head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens to tell the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of Patmos.

The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less
I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and
as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,
without asking too many questions.

The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

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.

[ ... ] The most effective insinuation is the one that gives facts that are valueless in themselves, yet cannot be denied because they are true.

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

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 library is testimony to truth and to error,

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century ... First of all, what style should I employ?

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.

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.

An we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness an that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything.

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.

But Roberto already knew what the Jesuit's real objection would be. Like that of the abbe on that evening of the duel when Saint-Savin provoked him: If there are infinite worlds, the Redemption can no longer have any meaning, and we are obliged either to imagine infinite Calvaries or to look on our terrestrial flowerbed as a priveleged spot of the Cosmos, on which God permitted His Son to descend and free us from sin, while the other worlds were not granted this grace
to the discredit of His infinite goodness.

To survive, you must tell stories.

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

Living the same sorrows three times was a suffering, but it was a suffering to relive even the same joys. The joy of life is born from feeling, whether it be joy or grief, always of short duration, and woe to those who know they will enjoy eternal bliss.

The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance.

Who among us is living in the past? You, who would bestow the horrors of the toiling industrial age upon this country, or I, who wish that our poor Europe might recover the naturalness and faith of these children of slaves?

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.

A complicit mustiness hung in the air, the odour of silence and calm.

Such is the magic of human languages, that by human accord often the same sounds mean different things.

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

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.

For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines
some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege
I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words ...

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn't know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn't know that a few seconds before winning I wasn't sure I wouldn't lose.

Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

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.

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

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

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr.

If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

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.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

someone has mixed and shuffled the words of the Book more than was right.

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

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

Will we be happier afterwards? Or will be have lost the freshness of those who are privileged to experience art as real life, where we enter after the trumps have been played, and we leave without knowing who's going to win or lose the game?

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.

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

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?

All the same," I said, "when you read the prints in the snow and the evidence of the branches, you did not yet know Brunellus. In a certain sense those prints spoke of all horses, or at least all horses of that breed. Mustn't we say, then, that the book of nature speaks to us only of essences, as many distinguished theologians teach?"
"Not entirely, dear Adso," my master replied. "True, that kind of print expressed to me, if you like, the idea of 'horse,' the verbum mentis, and would have expressed the same to me wherever I might have found it. But the print in that place and at that hour of the day told me that at least one of all possible horses had passed that way. So I found myself halfway between the perception of the concept 'horse' and the knowledge of an individu?al horse. And in any case, what I knew of the universal horse had been given me by those traces, which were singular. I could say I was caught at that moment between the singularity of the traces and my ignorance, which assumed the quite diaphanous form of a univer?sal idea. If you see something from a distance, and you do not understand what it is, you will be content with defining it as a body of some dimension. When you come closer, you will then define it as an animal, even if you do not yet know whether it is a horse or an ass. And finally, when it is still closer, you will be able to say it is a horse even if you do not yet know whether it is Brunellus or Niger. And only when you are at the proper

What does the philosopher say? Odi ergo sum. I hate therefore I am.

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

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.

Boethius says, nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn;

As a little drop of water added to a quantity of wine is completely dispersed and takes on the color and taste of wine, as red-hot iron becomes like molten fire losing its original form, as air when it is inundated with the sun's light is transformed into total splendor and clarity so that it no longer seems illuminated but, rather, seems to be light itself, so I felt myself die of tender liquefaction, and I had only the strength left to murmur the words of the psalm: "Behold my bosom is like new wine, sealed, which bursts new vessels," and suddenly I saw a brilliant light and in it a saffron-colored form which flamed up in a sweet and shining fire, and that splendid light spread through all the shining fire, and this shining fire through that golden form and that brilliant light and that shining fire through the whole form.

There are only four questions of importance in life: What is sacred, of what is the spirit made, what is worth living for, and what is worth dying for. The answer to all of them is the same. Only LOVE.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

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.

Among the many certainties whose lack he complained of, one alone is present, and it is that all things appear to us as they appear to us, and it is impossible for them to appear otherwise.

If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.

I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn't like to watch television. I'm just the only one who confesses

Recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book ...

The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?

Hitler's one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohlweltlehre.

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

I should be at peace. I have understood. Don't some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and truimph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys ...

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

In the years when I discoverd the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing.

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.

when a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm. We must act as if we had eternity before us.

He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

And anyone who nurtures impossible hopes is already a loser. Once you come to realize it, you just give up.

The dove, as it flies in the sun, seems simply to sparkle like silver, but only one who has been able to wait at length to discover its hidden face will see its true gold or, rather, the color of a shining orange.

Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.

He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open.

You're innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got your degree, you didn't shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too, were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything."

"Everything?"

"Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmos. but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same. And there are other pendulums: there's one in New York, in the UN building, there's one in the science museum in San Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it."

"God is everywhere."

"In a sense, yes. That's why the Pendulum disturbs me. It promises the infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. So it isn't enough to worship the Pendulum; you still have to make a decision, you have to find the best point for it. And yet..."

"And yet?"

"And yet... You're not taking me seriously by any chance, are you, Casaubon? No, I can rest easy; we're not the type to take things seriously.... Well, as I was saying, the feeling you have is that you've spent a lifetime hang

For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of "Is your novel an open work or not?" How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or "With which of your characters do you identify?" For God's sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.

I'd never understood whether the vogue for apologising is a sign of humility of impudence: you do something you shouldn't have done, then you apologise and wash your hands of it.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

The ways of the Antichrist are slow and tortuous. He arrives when we do not expect him: not because the calculation suggested by the apostle was mistaken, but because we have not learned the art.

To be intensely educated about the horror of sin and then to be conquered by it. I tell myself that it must be prohibition that kindles fantasy

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

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

I will tell you the deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole in the top, also, the water spurts out below."
"Isn't that obvious?" I said. "Air enters at the top and presses the water down."
"A typical scientific explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second place, but why it refuses to come out in the first case."
"And why does it refuse?" Garamond asked eagerly.
"Because, if it came out, it would leave a vacuum in the vessel, and nature abhors a vacuum. Nequaquam vacui was a Rosicrucian principle, which modern science has forgotten."
"Excuse me," Belbo said to Agliè, "but your argument is simply post hoc ergo ante hoc. What follows causes what came before.
You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn't. Nature doesn't; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.

Then it is he who has sinned, not me. If I had to start worrying whether the client might be lying, I would no longer be in this profession, which is based on trust.

There are secrets that kill. But

Characters migrate

And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting.

Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.

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

The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.

But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?" I asked, for no good reason. "Is Jorge right?" "Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave ...

I write what I write.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

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

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

Chatter then will be phatic discourse that has become an end in itself, but sports chatter is something more, a continuous phatic discourse that deceitfully passes itself off as talk of the City and its Ends. Born as the raising to the nth power of that initial (and rational) waste that is sports recreation, sports chatter is the glorification of Waste, and therefore the maximum point of Consumption. On it and in it the consumer civilization man actually consumes himself (and every possibility of thematizing and judging the enforced consumption to which he is invited and subjected).