Quotes from Umberto Eco

Rischiamo di restare sommersi da un eccesso di informazioni, e la differenza tra il silenzio e il troppo rumore è davvero minima

He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.

Perdona siempre a tu enemigo. No hay nada que le enfurezca más»)

Günümüzde bilginler, çoÄŸu kez cücelerin omuzlar?na ç?km?? cücelerden baÅŸka bir ÅŸey deÄŸildir.

Perception is always interrogative and conditional and is invariably based (even if we do not realize it) on a bet.

El francés no sabe bien qué quiere, lo único que sabe a la perfección es que no quiere lo que tiene. Y para decirlo no sabe sino cantar canciones.

I do not ask much, only Total Power

hombre político contemporáneo es el ser más distanciado de la gente común porque vive en fortines protegidos, viaja en automóviles blindados, se mueve rodeado de gorilas, y por lo tanto la gente lo ve solo de lejos y nunca tiene ocasión de hacer la compra en el supermercado o la cola en una ventanilla municipal.

Is this possible? To spend a life punishing people who will never know they have been punished? So

I believe that when too many people gather together, lured by a promise and immediately demanding something, there is never any knowing who among them speaks. I recalled

The task of general semiotics is that of tracing a single formal structure which underlies all these phenomena, this structure being that of the inference which generates interpretation. The task of specific semiotics, on the other hand, will be that of establishing—according to the sign system in question—the rules of greater or lesser semiotic necessity for inferences (institutionalization rules).

I am fascinated by stupidity] because normal intelligence is boring. Two plus two makes four - finished. You have no possibilities! Stupidity is infinite. Two plus two can make billions of different numbers.

Dizem que a alma é somente aquilo que se faz, mas, se eu odeio alguém e cultivo esse rancor, ...isso significa que existe um dentro!

se trata de un consumismo que no tiende a la posesión de objetos de deseo con los que contentarse, sino que inmediatamente los vuelve obsoletos, y el individuo pasa de un consumo a otro en una especie de bulimia sin objetivo (el nuevo teléfono móvil nos ofrece poquísimas prestaciones nuevas respecto al viejo, pero el viejo tiene que ir al desguace para participar en esta orgía del deseo). Crisis

hay dos clases de poetas: los buenos, que queman sus poemas a los dieciocho años, y los malos, que siguen escribiendo poesía mientras

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

An unhappy land, then, is one whose citizens no longer know where duty lies, and seek a charismatic leader who tells them what to do. Which, if I remember correctly, is what Hitler promulgated in Mein Kampf.

Quizá la tarea del que ama a los hombres consista en lograr que éstos se rían de la verdad, lograr que la verdad ría, porque la única verdad consiste en aprender a liberarnos de la insana pasión por la verdad.

Perhaps we are, somewhere, the deep impulse which generates semiosis, And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress, signifying systems and communicational processes. The map of semiosis, as defined at a given stage of historical development (with the debris carried over from previous semiosis), tells us who we are and what (or how) we think.

Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must do or can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

he was thinking of the endless array of symbols with which God, through His creatures, speaks to us of the eternal life. But the universe is even more talkative than Alanus thought, and it speaks not only of the ultimate things (which it does always in an obscure fashion) but also of closer things, and then it speaks quite clearly.

Elsewhere, on the contrary, the frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories; the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth. 

Terra incognita (???????? ???)

todo acto de apropiación implica una dosis de violencia