Quotes from Umberto Eco

The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

We live for books.

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...

To survive, you must tell stories.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Then why do you want to know?" "Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

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.

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

As the man said, for every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's wrong.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear."" -