36 Umberto Eco Quotes

Umberto Eco quotes

1. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn't called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

2. I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.

3. 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.

4. 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 Abbe de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

5. Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

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

7. In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.

8. To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

9. Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

10. After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia.

11. A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.

12. I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.

1. With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.

2. With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China.

3. 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.

4. Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

5. The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

6. The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.

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

8. American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an American percolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes, served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like pure spring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cup contains more caffeine than four espressos.

9. 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.

10. They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because cats live by their ability to smell, it can no longer recognize things. I'm a cat that hit its nose.

11. All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

12. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.

13. Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.

14. Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

15. I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.

16. The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

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

18. And we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness and that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything.

19. How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

20. There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.

21. But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.

22. I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.

23. 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.

24. The good of a book lies in its being read.