Umberto 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

If you could decide on characters' destinies it would be like going to the desk of a travel agent who says: So where do you want to find the whale, in Samoa or in the Aleutian Islands? And when? And do you want to be the one who kills it or let Queequeg do it? Whereas the real lesson of Moby-Dick is that the whale goes wherever it wants. ~ Umberto Eco

Luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene. ~ Umberto Eco

I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species. ~ Umberto Eco

But you see how man is also machine, and it suffices to turn one wheel on the surface and other wheels then turn inside: the brother and the enmity are merely the reflection of the fear that each man has of himself, of the recesses of his own soul, where unconfessed desires lurk, or, as they are saying in Paris, unconscious concepts. For it has been demonstrated that imperceptible thoughts exist, affecting the soul without the soul's being aware of them, clandestine thoughts whose existence is demonstrated by the fact that, however little each of us examines himself, he will not fail to remark that in his heart he bears love or hatred, joy or sorrow, while remaining unable to remember distinctly the thoughts that generated it. ~ Umberto Eco

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 ~ Umberto Eco

But sometimes Belbo, when he became really angry, lost his composure. Since loss of composure was the one thing he could not tolerate in others, his own was wholly internal - and regional. He would purse his lips, raise his eyes, then look down, tilt his head to the left, and say in a soft voice: "Ma gavte la nata." For anyone who didn't know that Piedmontese expression, he would occasionally explain: "Ma gavte la nata. Take out the cork." You say it to one who is full of himself, the idea being that what causes him to swell and strut is the pressure of a cork stuck in his behind. Remove it, and phsssssh, he returns to the human condition. ~ Umberto Eco

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

To survive, you must tell stories. ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Umberto Eco

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

We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us. ~ Umberto Eco

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). ~ Umberto Eco

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

The person who doesn't read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards. ~ Umberto Eco

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

Art is a serious matter ~ Umberto Eco

The year had begun with the first protests in Milan against the Austrians, where citizens had stopped smoking to damage the revenues of the imperial government (those Milanese comrades, who stood firm when soldiers and police provoked them by blowing clouds of sweet-scented cigar smoke at them, were seen by my Turin companions as heroes). ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Umberto Eco

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

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

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel. ~ Umberto Eco

In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. 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. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood. ~ Umberto Eco

The German lives in a state of perpetual intestinal embarrassment due to an excess of beer and the pork sausages on which he gorges himself. ~ Umberto Eco