Umberto Eco Quotes

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

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

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.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

To survive, you must tell stories.

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.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

We live for books.

I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

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

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

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.

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.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

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

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

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

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

We like lists because we don't want to die.

Books always speak of other books.

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

Translation is the art of failure.

That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.

When your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies.

When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.

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

You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.

Fear prophets 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.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom

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

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.