Umberto Eco Quotes: 27

• Translation is the art of failure.

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

• 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...

  The Name of the Rose

• To survive, you must tell stories.

  The Island of the Day Before

• 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.

• 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.

  Foucault's Pendulum

• I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

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

  The Prague Cemetery

• 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.

  The Name of the Rose

• 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.

  Postscript to the Name of the Rose

• 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.

  The Name of the Rose

• 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.

  The Island of the Day Before

• 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.

  Postscript to the Name of the Rose

• 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.

  Postscript to the Name of the Rose

• 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.

  The Name of the Rose

• I felt like poisoning a monk.

  Postscript to the Name of the Rose

• 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.

  Foucault's Pendulum

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

  Postscript to the Name of the Rose

• 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.

  The Island of the Day Before

• 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.

  The Island of the Day Before

• The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the lessI value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,without asking too many questions.

  The Name of the Rose

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

• 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.

  The Name of the Rose

• 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.

  The Island of the Day Before

• 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.

  The Prague Cemetery

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

  Foucault's Pendulum