Umberto Eco - Truth Quotes

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

Umberto Eco
Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

Umberto Eco
After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?

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

Umberto Eco
The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.

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
The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.

Umberto Eco
I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

Umberto Eco