Umberto Eco Quotes

171 Sourced Quotes

Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.

Umberto Eco
I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.

Umberto Eco
The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.

Umberto Eco
Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

Umberto Eco
The interpretation of metaphors shifts from the univocality of catachreses to the open possibilities offered by inventive metaphors.

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

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
The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

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

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
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

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
The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maidens?

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

Umberto Eco
A philosophy has a practical power: It contributes to the changing of the world.

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

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
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

Umberto Eco
The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.

Umberto Eco
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

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

Umberto Eco