Quotes from Umberto Eco

Le pregunté cómo se llamaba el gato y contestó que los gatos no se llaman porque no son cristianos como los perros

La desesperada soledad de las paralelas que no se encuentran jamás

Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.

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

For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color. - William

And in that moment I experience a revelation. I realize now that it was a painful sense that the world is purposeless, the lazy fruit of a misunderstanding, but in that moment I was able to translate what I felt only as: God does not exist.

Porque no todas las verdades son para todos los oídos, ni todas las mentiras pueden ser reconocidas como tales por cualquier alma piadosa

three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Ma gavte la nata.

What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves?

For architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called "kosmos," that is to say ornate, since it is like a great animal on whom there shine the perfection and the proportion of all its members. And praised be our Creator who, as the Scriptures say, has decreed all things in number, weight, and measure.

And if it is possible that creatures live underwater, could not creatures also live under the earth, nations of salamanders capable of arriving, through their tunnels, at the central fire that animates the planet?

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

omne animal triste post coitum

Herkes kendi geleneklerine uymayana barbarl?k der" - Montaigne 16. Yüzy?l Rönesans Ça??

It's so beautiful.

Nebulat ergo cogito.

But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.

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. 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.

Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how.

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, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.

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

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past (en me retraçant ces détails, j'en suis à me demander s'ils sont réels, ou bien si je les ai rêvés). As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.