Umberto Eco Quotes

171 Sourced Quotes

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

Umberto Eco
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn't boast of his own death or of others'. But he does not repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was.

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

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. In two months I will be eighty years old. Probably I will not write another novel, and so mankind will be safe.

Umberto Eco
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

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
In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.

Umberto Eco
But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.

Umberto Eco
All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.

Umberto Eco
I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

Umberto Eco
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

Umberto Eco
After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia.

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
To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don't believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn't exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone.

Umberto Eco
But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.

Umberto Eco
How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

Umberto Eco
A philosophy does not play its role as an actor during a recital; it interacts with other philosophies and with other facts, and it cannot know the results of the interaction between itself and other world visions.

Umberto Eco
The sign is a gesture produced with the intention of communicating, that is, in order to transmit one's representation or inner state to another being.

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
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.

Umberto Eco
In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

Umberto Eco
The Poet had, who had made a show of attaching no importance to this literary game (though it gnawed at his heart that he himself had not written such beautiful letters, provoking replies even more beautiful), and having no one with whom to fall in love, had fallen in love with the letters themselves — which, as Niketas remarked with a smile — was not surprising, since in youth we are prone to fall in love with love.

Umberto Eco
"You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry."

Umberto Eco
Philosophies can be judged, at most, on the grounds of the perspicacity with which they decide that something is worthy of becoming the starting point for a global explanatory hypothesis.

Umberto Eco
For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us.

Umberto Eco