Quotes from Umberto Eco

But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery.

the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane's dimensions, the triadic beginning of pi, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.

Todo concepto filosófico, tomado en su sentido más genérico, explica cualquier cosa.

Books always speak of other books.

What better hiding place for the true Templar than in the crowd of his caricatures?

Poor boy, the libertine then said, he builds machines to count the infinite, and we have terrified him with the eternal silence of too many infinities. Voila, the end of a fine vocation.

If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.

Classical mythology is a catalogue of indescribable cruelty: [...] It is a world dominated by evil, where even the most beautiful beings carry out atrocities.

The library is testimony to truth and to error

the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved

Here's a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs.

A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles .

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.

when a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm. We must act as if we had eternity before us.

The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. 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.

The simple cannot choose their personal heresy, Adso; they cling to the man preaching in their land, who passes through their village or stops in their square.

As long as you remain in your private vacuum, you can pretend you are in harmony with the One. But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil.

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.

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.

Hay cosas que ves venir, no es que te enamores porque te enamoras, te enamoras porque en ese período tenías una desesperada necesidad de enamorarte. En los períodos en que tienes ganas de enamorarte debes fijarte bien dónde te metes: como haber bebido un filtro, de esos que hacen que uno se enamore del primero que pasa. Podría ser un ornitorrinco.

Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it.

But Paris, all in all, isn't what it used o be, ever since that pencil sharpener, the Eiffel Tower, has been sticking up in the distance, visible from every angle.

New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue the real thing.

The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.