Quotes from Umberto Eco

Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. It's very boring to talk about winners. The real literature always talks about losers. Madame Bovary is a loser. Julien Sorel is a loser. I am doing only the same job. Losers are more fascinating. Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance

It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader. Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.

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.

The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.

The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.

T?t c? m?i th?, k? c? có v? t?m phào, má»™t ngày nào Ä'ó cÅ©ng có th? tr? nên h?u ích. ?i?u quan tr?ng là bi?t ???c Ä'i?u mà ng??i khác không bi?t là b?n bi?t.

It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating ...

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?

Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature's ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.

He is always on the brink of suicide... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives.

He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open.

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.

But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?

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.

When a spy sells something entirely new, all he needs to do is recount something you could find in any second-hand book stall.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produces no concept; therefore, it is dumb.

we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

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

With Germans, as with women, you never get to the point.

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.

At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.

Adso of Melk: The Koran, the Bible of the infidels, a perverse book … William of Baskerville: A book containing a wisdom different from ours.

living the same sorrows three times was a suffering, but it was a suffering to relive even the same joys. The joy of life is born from feeling, whether it be joy or grief, always of short duration, and woe to those who know they will enjoy eternal bliss.

And this? Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Listen to this page: 'Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimum paternoque presertim privilegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgatas.' ... The words all begin with the same letter! The men of my islands are all a bit mad, William said proudly.