Umberto Eco Quotes

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

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.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

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.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.

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.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

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

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

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.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness, not though courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.

What model reader did I want as i was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game.

In the years when I discoverd the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing.

Translation is the art of failure.

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.

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

Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.

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?

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.

I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion - which I could see he always harbored - that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment.

Atât de mare e puterea adevărului care, precum binele, se răspândește de la sine.

In this universe of ours, with its wealth of errors and legends, historical data and false information, one absolute truth is the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. All the rest is always open to debate.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

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.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

Then why do you want to know?"

"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.

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.

Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach
them how to use television.

They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on. Civilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen on the last priest, and the earth is rid of that evil lot.

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.

Die Menschen tun das Böse nie so vollständig und begeistert, wie wenn sie es aus religiöser Überzeugung tun.

De mens bedrijft het kwaad nooit zo hartstochtig en vol overgave als wanneer hij dat doet uit godsdienstige overtuiging.

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.

The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of 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 from whence he came.

We live for books.

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...

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

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.

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.

Cartea a dovedit ce poate, și nu vedem un alt obiect mai bun pe care l-am putea crea pentru aceeași întrebuințare.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.

Μου φτάνει που ξέρω να διαβάζω, γιατί έτσι μαθαίνω αυτά που δεν ξέρω, ενώ όταν γράφεις, γ�%8

The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.

Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.

(Casablanca, or, The Clichés Are Having a Ball)

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

New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing.

The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.

How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull.

Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

A scoundrel is an evil heliotrope turning always in the direction of the most powerful.

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.

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