Preservative Eco Quotes

So we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil. ~ Umberto Eco

Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong. ~ Umberto Eco

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable. - Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993 ~ Tony Hillerman

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

Characters migrate ~ Umberto Eco

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes? ~ Umberto Eco

So you truly do not believe in God?"
"I find no reason to, in nature ... If the idea of God is unknown in the state of nature, it must then be a human invention. ~ Umberto Eco

In a story there is always a reader, and this reader is a fundamental ingredient not only of the process of storytelling but also of the tale itself. Today, ~ Umberto Eco

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful Earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the Earth and it is part of us. ~ Chief Seattle

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

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking. ~ Umberto Eco

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

We don't see them, but, invisible, they act all around us. ~ Umberto Eco

And in that city Ferrante's rise began, at the outer edge of the Spanish court, where he learned that the virtue of sovereigns is their caprice, and Power is an insatiable monster, to be served with slavish devotion in order to snatch every crumb falling from that table. ~ Umberto Eco

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

Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands. ~ Umberto Eco

Loving the Earth with a fierce devotion can mean that we view the damage being done to nature as attacks on our own family and kinship group. The despair and rage we feel as witnesses to terracide, animal exploitation and the everyday callous disregard for the environment can be channelled into creating awareness, resistance efforts, the earth rights movement, and by rejecting the numbing and destructive values of Empire. By opening our hearts to the Earth in our thoughts, words, actions and cultural life we will find sacred purpose in the co-creation of an earth-honoring society. Our re-enchantment with the natural world is essential for devoting ourselves to eco-activism, environmental healing, earth restoration and rewilding, and the future rests with us! ~ Pegi Eyers

Our life on earth cannot sustain without healthy oceans - and because of that, the beings who inhabit and allow that eco system to work need our help. Let's start with our wonderment, and go from there. Allow that, and it becomes easy. ~ Maggie Q

Success is the ability to meet worthy goals, but it's also the ability to love and have compassion and the ability to get in touch with your creative center, to transform yourself toward more peaceful and just pursuits. I hope we redefine success. Otherwise, we'll see more of what we're already seeing - more aggression, more burnout, more Wall Street scandals, more war, more terrorism, more eco-destruction. ~ Deepak Chopra

In this universe of ours, with its wealth of errors and legends, historical data and false information, one absolute truth is the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. All the rest is always open to debate. ~ Umberto Eco

What's that got to do with anything? ~ Umberto Eco

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly. ~ Umberto Eco

Open text is one of a pair of terms popularized by Eco to refer to kinds of interpretative interactions between text and reader. An open text, unlike a closed one such as a work of popular fiction, is not aimed at a specific reader in a specific social context. It is also open in that its theme, structure and language are more complex, less explicit, more "open-ended": what other critics as Barthes in reception theory would call "Indeterminate". The open text constructs the model of its own reader as part of its structural strategy. ~ Katie Wales

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

Poor boy," the libertine then said, "he builds machines to count the infinite, and we have terrified him with the eternal silence of too many infinities. Voila, the end of a fine vocation. ~ Umberto Eco

There is no excuse-and we should call a spade a spade-for chemical companies and oil refineries using our major rivers as pipelines for toxic waste. There is no excuse for communities to use other people's rivers as a dump for their raw sewage. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

penitenziagite! watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! death is super nos! pray the santo pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! ha ha, you like this negromanzia de domini nostri jesu christi! et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors...cave el diabolo! semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. but salvatore is not stupidus! bonum monsasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. and the resto is not worth merda. amen. no? ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Umberto Eco

When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed. ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Umberto Eco

Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how. ~ Umberto Eco

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

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon. ~ Umberto Eco

You live on the surface," Lia told me years later. "You sometimes seem profound, but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you try to stand it up. ~ Umberto Eco

I felt dull and somnolent, for 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. William ~ Umberto Eco

There are so many problems to solve on this planet first before we begin to trash other worlds. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Anything was possible if the impossible was true. ~ Umberto Eco

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

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way. ~ Umberto Eco

Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness. ~ Umberto Eco

I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered 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. And so I now feel free to tell, for sheer narrative pleasure, the story of Adso of Melk, and I am comforted and consoled in finding it immeasurably remote in time (now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep had generated), gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day, atemporally alien to our hopes and our certainties. ~ 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

And in that moment I experience a revelation.
I realize now that it was a painful sense that the world is purposeless, the lazy fruit of a misunderstanding, but in that moment I was able to translate what I felt only as: God does not exist. ~ Umberto Eco

Our system - of debt-fueled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth - is eating itself alive. ~ Paul Gilding

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