Umberto Eco (Writer)

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.

— Umberto Eco language

Wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else… ~

— Umberto Eco work

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

— Umberto Eco believe

Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'

— Umberto Eco war

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 truth

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 art

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

— Umberto Eco politics

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn't boast of his own death or of others'. But he does not repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was.

— Umberto Eco death

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.

— Umberto Eco time

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.

— Umberto Eco life

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

— Umberto Eco write

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

— Umberto Eco art

It is only petty men who seem normal.

— Umberto Eco men

Il nome della rosa (1980); The Name of the Rose (1983)

— 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 Abb

— Umberto Eco people

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 love

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 believe

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 learning

"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 men

"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 truth

"The hand of God creates; it does not conceal."

— Umberto Eco create

"Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus."

— 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 war

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.

— Umberto Eco truth

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

— Umberto Eco war

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.

— Umberto Eco time

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

— Umberto Eco dreams

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

— Umberto Eco challenge

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

— Umberto Eco sex

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

— Umberto Eco body

Translation is the art of failure.

— Umberto Eco art

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 lies

But now 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 truth

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

— Umberto Eco life

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

— Umberto Eco you

We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.

— Umberto Eco living

Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.

— Umberto Eco men

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 truth

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

— Umberto Eco life

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

— Umberto Eco men

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

— Umberto Eco success

It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.

— Umberto Eco time

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 love

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

— Umberto Eco dreams

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

— Umberto Eco people

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

— Umberto Eco freedom

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

— Umberto Eco fear

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

— Umberto Eco books

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

— Umberto Eco humor

Temi, Adso, i profeti e coloro disposti a morire per la verità, ché di solito fan morire moltissimo con loro, spesso prima di loro, talvolta al posto loro.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. William of Baskerville

— Umberto Eco truth

In this world you either read or write, and writers write out of contempt for their colleagues, out of a desire to have something good to read once in a while.

— Umberto Eco world

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