Eco Quotes

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

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 ... ~ Umberto Eco

As long as you remain in your private vacuum, you can pretend you are in harmony with the One. But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil. ~ Umberto Eco

It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world. ~ Umberto Eco

You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus. ~ Umberto Eco

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian. ~ Umberto Eco

So it is best for you to withdraw into the world of your portents, for there at least you can decide yourself how portentous they are. ~ Umberto Eco

...It would hardly be a waste of time if sometimes even the most advanced students in the cognitive sciences were to pay a visit to their ancestors. It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a painter without having ever seen a single work by Raphael, or a writer without having ever read the classics. Such things are theoretically possible; but the 'primitive' artist, condemned to an ignorance of the past, is always recognizable as such and rightly labeled as naïf. It is only when we consider past projects revealed as utopian or as failures that we are apprised of the dangers and possibilities for failure for our allegedly new projects. The study of the deeds of our ancestors is thus more than an atiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution. ~ Umberto Eco

Some eco groups suggest that as many as 73 million sharks are killed globally every year. Hammerheads, blue sharks, mako sharks - they're disappearing, and they ain't coming back. ~ Stephen Rodrick

he would learn - truth is brief (afterward, it is all commentary). So ~ Umberto Eco

Not using fossil fuels is tantamount to not using energy. It is economic suicide and eco-manslaughter. ~ Paul Driessen

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? ~ Umberto Eco

A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny. ~ Umberto Eco

-jeez, these guys, with their on-again, off-again rela­tionships, lutgen said;
-Yeah, Dave said: now you see them, now you see them once more;
-They're virtual insects!, Jurgen said;
-Virtually innumerable, said Dave;
-I wonder, though, if we haven't got it wrong, Jurgen said: I mean, I wonder if maybe these guys' natural condition isn't to be lit up-if their ground state isn't actually when they're glowing;
-Hm, said Dave: so what they're actually doing is turning off their lights­
-Right: momentarily going under;
-Flashing darkness­
-Projecting their inner voids­
-Their repeating, periodic depressions ...
-So then, I suppose, we should really call them douse bugs---;.
-Exactly...
-Or nature's faders---;.
-Flying extinguishers­
-Buzzing snuffers-!
-Or maybe­
-Or maybe, despite what it looks like, maybe they really are glowing constantly, Jurgen said: but, through some malign unknown mechanism, their everlasting light is peri­odically swallowed up by un-understood atmospheric forces;
-So then they're being occluded­
-Rudely occluded­
-Denied their God-given right to shine ...
-So that, I suppose, would make them-o horror-victims­
-Yeah: victims of predatory darkness­
-Of uncontrollable flares of night;
-So it isn't bioluminescence, but eco-eclipsis­
-Exactly: ambient effacement­
-Nature's station-identification­
-Ongoing lessons in humility ...
Evan Dara

The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an "anti-library," a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one's personal trove should contain as much of what you don't know as possible. Some ~ Pamela Paul

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

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. ~ Umberto Eco

Does it make sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convince yourself that you would have chosen the right one - had you had the Opportunity? I ~ Umberto Eco

Whoever reflects on four things, it were better he had never been born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, and that which is after. - Talmud, Hagigah 2.1 ~ Umberto Eco

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

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.
There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules ... ~ Umberto Eco

Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself. ~ Umberto Eco

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

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

I know quite a few eco designers who build dresses out of old couture gowns. They disassemble, 'upcycle,' and reuse them in extraordinary ways. To me, that's a sustainable way of doing things. ~ Suzy Amis

The transpersonal experiences revealing the Earth as an intelligent, conscious entity are corroborated by scientific evidence. Gregory Bateson, who created a brilliant synthesis of cybernetics, information and systems theory, the theory of evolution, anthropology, and psychology came to the conclusion that it was logically inevitable to assume that mental processes occurred at all levels in any system or natural phenomenon of sufficient complexity. He believed that mental processes are present in cells, organs, tissues, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, and even the earth and universe as a whole. ~ Stanislav Grof

The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless. ~ Umberto Eco

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am. ~ Umberto Eco

For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time. ~ Umberto Eco

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love. ~ Umberto Eco

In nature the only source of energy is from the sun. So in ecological systems everything comes from the sun through the process of photosynthesis whereas now in human built environment our source of energy is from fossil fuels, renewable, wood energy or hydro-energy but it is not from the sun. So until we are able to operate and run a human built environment by imitating photosynthesis it will be a long while before we can have a true eco-system. ~ Ken Yeang

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. ~ Umberto Eco

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

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

For the male who dominates and writes, or by writing dominates, the woman has always been portrayed with hostility from the earliest times. Let us not be deceived by angelic descriptions of women. On the contrary, precisely because great literature is dominated by sweet, gentle creatures, the world of satire - which is that of the popular imagination - continually demonizes the woman, from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and up to modern times. ~ Umberto Eco

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

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. ~ Umberto Eco

If dominating and destructive relations to the earth are interrelated with gender, class, and racial domination, then a healed relation to the earth cannot come about simply through technological 'fixes'. It demands a social reordering to bring about just and loving interrelationship between men and women, between races and nations, between groups presently stratified into social classes, manifest in great disparities of access to the means of life. In short, it demands that we must speak of eco-justice, and not simply of domination of the earth as though that happened unrelated to social domination. ~ Rosemary Radford Ruether

But we were talking about economics?" John said. "But this is economics, don't you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use - this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South." "They were predators on the South," John said. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die. ~ Umberto Eco

Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. It's very boring to talk about winners. The real literature always talks about losers. Madame Bovary is a loser. Julien Sorel is a loser. I am doing only the same job. Losers are more fascinating. Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance ~ Umberto Eco

Alamut could be reached only astride eagles. ~ Umberto Eco

We are playing Russian roulette with features of the planet's atmosphere that will profoundly impact generations to come. How long are we willing to gamble? ~ David Suzuki

Your little eco-friendly fairy tale ain't going to happen. This was farming land long before it was cute-house land. ~ Christopher Bollen

There are times when I think of switching to narcotics. There, at least you can rely on a heroin pusher to push heroin. ~ Umberto Eco

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

The truth is an anagram of an anagram. ~ Umberto Eco

Here he was holding the clear proof of the existence of other skies, but at the same time without having to ascend beyond the celestial spheres, for he intuited many worlds in a piece of coral. Was there any need to calculate the number of forms which the atoms of the Universe could create
burning at the stake all those who said their number was not finite
when it sufficed to meditate for years on one of these marine objects to realize how the deviation of a single atom, whether willed by God or prompted by Chance, could generate inconceivable Milky Ways? ~ Umberto Eco

To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was. ~ Umberto Eco

We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. ~ Umberto Eco

Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false. But I was there that day, so now I am where I am. ~ Umberto Eco

It is always better when the person who frightens us is also afraid of us. ~ Umberto Eco

And I said to him when you learn to read then you learn everything you didnt know before. But when you write you write only what you know allready so patientia Im better off not knowing how to write because the ass is the ass ~ Umberto Eco

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 ... ~ Umberto Eco

An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d'Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it's an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege. ~ Umberto Eco

Poor idiot! Are you so foolish as to believe we will openly teach you the greatest and most important of secrets? I assure you that anyone who attempts to study, according to the ordinary and literal sense of their words, what the Hermetic Philosophers write, will soon find himself in the twists of a labyrinth from which he will be unable to escape, having no Ariadne's thread to lead him out. - Artephius ~ Umberto Eco

Depending on the season, between 20 and 30 percent of my collections contain some sort of eco or sustainable element, whether it's a beautiful organic fabric or a natural dye. And obviously I don't use animal skins or fur of any kind. ~ Stella McCartney

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. ~ Umberto Eco

Having reached the end of my poor sinner's life, my hair now white, I grow old as the world does, waiting to be lost in the bottomless pit of silent and deserted divinity, sharing in the light of angelic intelligences; ~ Umberto Eco

It's a paradox to be an actress, living in the city, taking planes all the time, trying to find the right balance in this life, which is not so eco-friendly, and still try to respect the environment. ~ Marion Cotillard

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? ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Umberto Eco

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

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

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

He had perhaps seen fifty springs and was therefore already very old, but his tireless body moved with an agility I myself often lacked. ~ Umberto Eco

I have been called an eco-designer simply because I use wood. But I am not an eco-designer, nor does the use of wood make me one. I am a designer who cares about the effect of what I do, and about making good things for people to keep and cherish - that, surely, is simply the basic condition for 'good design'? ~ David Trubridge

Regrets were strange things. The women you lost, the friendships you failed to nurture when only a little effort would have made the difference; the fights you walked away from - good fights, fighting for justice, for wilderness, for peace, all because it would have been a little inconvenient at the time.

Yes, regrets were, indeed, strange things.
Regrets, seasoned with age were the things that denied you the peace of slumber - - that deep sleep that nourishes your soul, not the restive, disquieting sleep of the disappointed and the damned. ~ Wayne D. King

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules. ~ Umberto Eco

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

Variación / Variations"

El remanso de aire
bajo la rama del eco.

El remanso del agua
bajo fronda de luceros.

El remanso de tu boca
bajo espesura de besos.

*

The still waters of the air
under the bough of the echo.

The still waters of the water
under a frond of stars.

The still waters of your mouth
under a thicket of kisses. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

A fish is more valuable swimming in the sea maintaining the integrity of oceanic eco-systems than it is on anyone's plate. ~ Paul Watson

How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull. ~ Umberto Eco

Consuming less is the fastest way to eco-fashion redemption - particularly if your preference is for leather, not hemp. ~ Sheherazade Goldsmith

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

I write what I write. ~ Umberto Eco

In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs - not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom. ~ Mark Steyn

Every great thinker is someone else's moron. ~ Umberto Eco

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion. ~ Umberto Eco

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

The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances. ~ Umberto Eco

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation. ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Umberto Eco

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all. ~ Umberto Eco

Climate change hype has grave real world consequences. It gets rich countries to adopt silly policies and to impose devastating eco-imperialism on poor countries. The world's rich millions can afford environmental extremism; its poor billions can't. Climate change pseudo-science about human causality has been exposed repeatedly. What's less appreciated is that there aren't more natural disasters in need of an explanation. ~ Leon Louw

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear ... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away ... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities. ~ Umberto Eco

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

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. ~ Umberto Eco

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid. ~ Umberto Eco

Art can never match the luxury and superfluity of Nature. In the former all is seen; it cannot afford concealed wealth, and is niggardly in comparison; but Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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

The good thing about the studium is the that you learn from your teachers, true, but even more from your fellows, especially those older than you, when they tell you what they have read, and you discover that the world must be full of wondrous things and to know them all - since a lifetime will not be a enough for you to travel through the whole world - you can only read all the books. ~ Umberto Eco

Agriculture is the process of turning eco-systems into people. ~ Toby Hemenway

Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves ~ William Cohen

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. ~ Umberto Eco

I've taken Eco drink everyday for a year and I can tell you that it works!!!! I definitely can tell when I miss a day ... ~ Robert Johnson

I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over. ~ Umberto Eco

Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it. ~ Umberto Eco

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Umberto Eco