Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose (1980)

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

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 wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Umberto Eco
I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.

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

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
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

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

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

Umberto Eco
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.

Umberto Eco
Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

Umberto Eco
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

Umberto Eco
Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

Umberto Eco
"That man is … odd," I dared say to William.
"He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal."

Umberto Eco
There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

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
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
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...

Umberto Eco
I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.

Umberto Eco
There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but towards hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

Umberto Eco