Quotes from Umberto Eco

I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he's almost always a lunatic.

The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.

As Clark Kent I take care of misunderstood young geniuses; as Superman I punish justly misunderstood old geniuses. I

Dreams of flying have haunted the collective imagination since time immemorial.

you must not worry if they do not yet exist, because that does not mean they will not exist later. And I say to you that God wishes them to be, and certainly they already are in His mind, even if my friend from Occam denies that ideas exist in such a way; and I do not say this because we can determine the divine nature but precisely because we cannot set any limit to it.

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Oh, what a harmony of abandonment and impulse, of unnatural and yet graceful postures, in that mystical language of limbs miraculously freed from the weight of corporeal matter, marked quantity infused with new substantial form, as if the holy band were struck by an impetuous wind, breath of life, frenzy of delight, rejoicing song of praise miraculously transformed, from the sound that it was, into image.

I have never encountered, not even in witchcraft trials, a dead man whom God or the Devil allowed to climb up from the abyss to erase the evidence of his misdeed—then

Minek olyan könyvet írni, amiért börtön járhat, ha egyszer azok, akik könyveket olvasnak, úgyis eleve republikánusok, a diktátor támogatói pedig írástudatlan parasztok, akiknek úgy pottyant ölébe Isten kegyelmébÅ'l a választójog?

If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns. —Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam, Wolters, 1694, p. 38

For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines -- some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege -- I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words...

so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.

the given language is power because it compels me to use already formulated stereotypes, including words themselves, and that it is structured so fatally that, slaves inside it, we cannot free ourselves outside it, because outside the given language there is nothing. How can we escape what Barthes calls, Sartre-like, this huis clos ? By cheating. You can cheat the given language. This dishonest and healthy and liberating trick is called literature.

luther, he ruined the bible by translating it into their own language.

Para ser tolerante, é preciso fixar os limites do intolerável.

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. Jorge

And is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing the truth but for delaying its appearance?

The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.

It's hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.

Qu'est-ce qui vous effraie le plus dans la pureté? — La hâte.

omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum

Sabemos muy bien cómo destruir una ciudad y cómo transportar información a bajo costo, pero todavía no tenemos ideas precisas sobre cómo conciliar el bienestar colectivo, el porvenir de los jóvenes, la superpoblación del mundo y la prolongación de la vida..

Librat nuk janë bërë për tu besuar, por për t'u hetuar. Kur lexojmë një libër nuk duhet të pyesim veten çfarë thotë, por çfarë nënkupton

Les hommes ne font jamais le mal aussi complètement et ardemment que lorsqu'ils le font par conviction religieuse. » (p. 26)