Quotes from Umberto Eco

Every text, after all, is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work. What a problem it would be if a text were to say everything the receiver is to understand - it would never end.

Kada policijos informatorius tampa išties patikimas? Kai atskleidžia s?moksl?. Tad reikia surengti s?moksl?, apie kur? gal?t? pranešti.

esiste una società segreta con ramificazioni in tutto il mondo, che complotta per diffondere la voce che esiste un complotto universale.

Here, then, is another proposition: The medium is not the message; the message becomes what the receiver makes of it, applying to it his own codes of reception, which are neither those of the sender nor those of the scholar of communications.

UnutuÅŸun tekniÄŸi yoktur, hâlâ rastgele, doÄŸal süreçlere baÄŸl?y?z, beyinsel lezyonlar, unutkanl?k ya da ne bileyim, yolculuk, alkol, uykuya kaç??, can?na k?yma gibi doÄŸaçlamalara.

I will not deny, however, that in the course of the journey, he sometimes stopped at the edge of a meadow, at the entrance to a forest, to gather some herb (always the same one, I believe): and he would then chew it with an absorbed look. He kept some of it with him, and ate it in the moments of greatest tension (and we had a number of them at the abbey!).

Por que Deus é o ser perfeitíssimo? Porque, se fosse imperfeitíssimo, seria meu primo Gustavo.

There's a difference between the 'moderate' overwhelm of a great bookshop and the infinite overwhelm of the Internet.

What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the sub-versive movements going on around us? Are there several Powers at work? Or is there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest—the circle of the real Initiates? —Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, London, Boswell, 1924, p. 348

What's that got to do with anything?

Cuando la naturaleza femenina, naturalmente tan perversa, se sublima en la santidad, entonces acierta a convertirse en el más elevado vehículo de la gracia.

The prince of darkness is a gentleman. —Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv

Never trust originality.

Le nouveau royaume de Jérusalem est un peu la Californie de l'époque, on peut y faire fortune.

The year had begun with the first protests in Milan against the Austrians, where citizens had stopped smoking to damage the revenues of the imperial government (those Milanese comrades, who stood firm when soldiers and police provoked them by blowing clouds of sweet-scented cigar smoke at them, were seen by my Turin companions as heroes).

It is the logic of research and discovery that is tortuous, because it is the logic of science. Whereas the logic of knowledge needs no discovery, because it knows already.

Alamut could be reached only astride eagles.

But how does it happen," I said with admiration, "that you were able to solve the mystery of the library looking at it from the outside, and you were unable to solve it when you were inside?" "Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.

It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.

The Frenchman doesn't really know what he wants, but knows perfectly well that he doesn't want what he has. And the only way he knows of saying it is by singing songs.

You respect books by using them, not leaving them alone.

But then how can we trust ancient wisdom, whose traces you are always seeking, if it is handed down by lying books that have interpreted it with such license? 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.

Jacopo seemed to have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in imagining absurd machines—only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented.

The advantage of a big city, move on a few meters and you find solitude again.