Umberto Eco Quotes

The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

To survive, you must tell stories.

Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

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.

Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously, these people could express themselves only with their friends or at the bar after two or three glasses of something, and they said every silliness, and people laughed. Now they have the possibility to show up on the internet. And so, on the internet, along with the messages of a lot of interesting and important people - even the Pope is writing on Twitter - we have a great quantity of idiots.

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

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

All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.

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.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

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.

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.

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

I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

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.

Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages... a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn't be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.