Quotes from Umberto Eco

You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

Our life is full of empty space.

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.

With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

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

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. 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.

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

Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull.

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.