Umberto Eco Quotes

171 Sourced Quotes

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

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
Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.

Umberto Eco
Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

Umberto Eco
This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.

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
"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....

Umberto Eco
Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it. Or rather, they have lost the religious sense of the feast and have tried to replace it with something else.

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 order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

Umberto Eco
For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.

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
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.

Umberto Eco
But I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

Umberto Eco
I don't even have an E-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages,

Umberto Eco
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

Umberto Eco
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

Umberto Eco
There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.

Umberto Eco
Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

Umberto Eco
One can and should light fires, eat bread, and enjoy physical beauty, but calmly and with disciplined serenity.

Umberto Eco
Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

Umberto Eco
The first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.

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

Umberto Eco
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Umberto Eco
In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.

Umberto Eco
American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100°C

Umberto Eco
I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

Umberto Eco
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?

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
We've got to help each other, seeing as God doesn't help us. Do you see how great Jesus' idea was? Imagine how much it must have irritated God. Forget the devil, Jesus was the only true enemy of God, and he's the only friend us poor wretches have.

Umberto Eco