Umberto Eco - Signs Quotes

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A sign is not only something which stands for something else; it is also something that can and must be interpreted.

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
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
Signs are not empirical objects. Empirical objects become signs (or they are looked at as signs) only from the point of view of a philosophical decision.

Umberto Eco
True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

Umberto Eco
To see human beings as signifying animals — even outside the practice of verbal language — and to see that their ability to produce and to interpret signs, as well as their ability to draw inferences, is rooted in the same cognitive structures, represent a way to give form to our experience.

Umberto Eco
You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

Umberto Eco
I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world.

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