Quotes from Umberto Eco

I dreamed what all losers dream, about one day writing a book that would bring me fame and fortune.

Über die deutsche Sprache: "Sie halten sich für tief, weil ihre Sprache unklar ist, ihr fehlt die clarté der französischen Sprache, sie sagt nie exakt das, was sie sollte, so dass kein Deutscher jemals weiß, was er sagen wollte – und dann verwechselt er diese Undeutlichkeit mit Tiefe. Es ist mit Deutschen wie mit Frauen, man gelangt bei ihnen nie auf den Grund

I didn't know how to define it -- hermetic skepticism? liturgical cynicism? -- this higher disbelief that led him to acknowledge the dignity of all the superstitions he scorned.

luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.

So you truly do not believe in God? I find no reason to, in nature... If the idea of God is unknown in the state of nature, it must then be a human invention.

I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.

When nature fails, we turn to art.

I don't believe one writes for oneself. I think that writing is an act of love- you write in order to give something to someone else. To communicate something. to have other people share your feelings. This problem of how long your work survives is fundamental for a novelist or a poet. One hopes for a sense of continuity.

Her yerde erinç arad?m, ama hiçbir yerde bulamad?m, bir kitapla çekildiÄŸim köÅŸeden baÅŸka.

Therefore you don't have a single answer to your questions?" "Adso, if I did I would teach theology in Paris." "In Paris do they always have the true answer?" "Never," William said, "but they are very sure of their errors.

Sir, Saint-Savin replied, 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.

Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.

Culture isn't knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.

and I said to him when you learn to read then you learn everything you didnt know before. But when you write you write only what you know allready so patientia Im better off not knowing how to write because the ass is the ass

The good of a book lies in it being read. A Book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in turn speak of things.

An we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness an that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything.

Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not 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.

Humbësit ashtu si autodidaktët kanë gjithnjë njohuri më të mëdha se fitimtarët. Nëse dëshiron të jesh fitimtar, duhet të dish vetëm një gjë e të mos humbasësh kohën për të mësuar gjithçka. Kënaqësia e erudicionit është vetëm për humbësit. Sa më shumë të dish, aq më keq mund të të shkojnë gjërat.

Born blind, he could move in that handsome luminous space (yes, he said luminous) of his church, seeing, as he said, the sun with his skin

315Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages… a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn't be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.

Atât de mare e puterea adev?rului care, precum binele, se r?spândeÈ™te de la sine.

The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?

In other words, to see if through these cultural phenomena a new Middle Ages is to take shape, a time of secular mystics, more inclined to monastic withdrawal than to civic participation. We should see how much, as antidote or as antistrophe, the old techniques of reason may apply, the arts of the Trivium, logic, dialectic, rhetoric. As we suspect that anyone who goes on stubbornly practicing them will be accused of impiety.

omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / nobis est in speculum (all the creatures of the world / as a book and a picture / are to us a mirror)