Quotes from Umberto Eco

But why do some people support [the heretics]? Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power. Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy? That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong.

a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves , and celebrating a reunion. ( Casablanca, or, The Clichés Are Having a Ball )

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.

INTERVIEWER Do you believe in God? ECO Why does one love a certain person one day and discover the next day that the love is gone? Feelings, alas, disappear without justification, and often without a trace. INTERVIEWER If you don't believe in God, then why have you written at such great length about religion? ECO Because I do believe in religion. Human beings are religious animals, and such a characteristic feature of human behavior cannot be ignored or dismissed.

Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist. It's the permutations that matter.

I should be at peace. I have understood. Don't some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and truimph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys...

Is it possible to say It was a beautiful morning at the end of November without feeling like Snoopy?

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to enquiry (William of Baskerville)

The real hero is always a hero by mistake.

Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.

The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.

What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.

Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.

Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to miracle.

It's hopeless, he went on. We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past! We are dwarfs, William admitted, but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they.

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

Not bad, not bad at all, Diotallevi said. To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.