Quotes from Umberto Eco

Waarom staat in de evangeliën niet wie er in Kana getrouwd is? Omdat het de bruiloft van Jezus zelf was, een bruiloft waarover niet gesproken kon worden omdat hij trouwde met een zondares, Maria Magdalena. (p.385)

For him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.

Yes. Mankind can't endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found—God, angels, devils. Synarchy performs the same function on a lesser scale.

Philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world.

el mundo se ha convertido en un asunto demasiado complicado para dejar que sea gobernado por quienes lo gobernaban antes.

and I loved the girl precisely because she existed, and I was happy, not envious, that she existed.

Benno blushed violently. "I am not a murderer!" he protested. "No one is, until he commits his first crime," William said philosophically.

No cierres mis labios abriendo los tuyos.

So, I was in love. Or was I rather, as often happens at that age, in love with love?

At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call constantly into question the very tales we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

The sun is good because it does the body good, and because it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, whatever returns is good, not what passes and is done with.

Yo sospecho, sospecho siempre.

Tyranny, you understand, has been achieved thanks to universal suffrage! The scoundrel has carried out an authoritarian coup d'état by appealing to the ignorant mob! This is a warning to us about the democracy of tomorrow.

of knowledge is for monks.

Tudjuk: az értelmiségi mint kategória valami igen nehezen körülírható dolog. Az "értelmiségi szerepet" viszont könnyebb meghatározni. Abból áll, hogy kritikus szemmel azonosítsuk, mi az, ami hellyel-közzel kielégítÅ' módon megfelel az igazságról alkotott elképzelésünknek.

By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

El saber no es como la moneda, que se mantiene físicamente intacta incluso a través de los intercambios más infames; se parece más bien a un traje de gran hermosura, que el uso y la ostentación van desgastando.

Vivimos para los libros. Dulce misión en este mundo dominado por el desorden y la decadencia.

Cuando hablo con Ubertino me da la impresión de que el infierno es el paraíso visto desde la otra parte. No

And so it was that the Poet, through an excess of theological refinement, was unable to satisfy his coarse carnal passion.

Fileisch tu magister quiere ir a sitio oscuro questa notte.

It seems that fictional worlds are parasitic on the real world.

But evidence is not enough for those who want to live in a horror novel.