Quotessence
Home / Authors / Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Quotes

Essayist

Filter quotes by topic

AllIfsBookWritingUmberto EcoWorldBelievePeopleThinkingKnowsNovel

Famous Umberto Eco Quotes

“Dumas has a truly clear understanding of the human mind. What does everyone desire, and desire more fervently the more wretched and unfortunate they are? To earn money easily, to have power (the enormous pleasure in commanding and humiliating your fellow man) and to avenge every wrong suffered (everyone in life has suffered at least one wrong, however small it might be). And that is why in Monte Cristo he shows us how to amass great wealth, enough to give you superhuman power, and how to make your enemies pay back every debt. But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit. Dumas offers, to the frustration of everyone (individuals as well as countries), the explanation for their failure. It was someone else, on Thunder Mountain, who planned your ruin.”

DesirePowerConspiracy TheoryPaybackWretch
Book:The Prague Cemetery
Create image

“I saw something ancient, because I knew I was not seeing something beautiful, but beauty itself, like the holy thought of God. I was discovering that perfection, even glimpsing it once, and once only, was something light and lovely. I looked at that form from the distance, but I felt that I had no hold on that image, as happens when you are on in years and you seem to glimpse clear signs on a parchment, but you know that the moment you move closer they will blur, and you will never be able to read the secret that the page was promising you - or, as in dreams, when something you desire appears to you, you reach out, move your fingers in the void, and grasp nothing.”

SpiritualRomanticThoughtful
Book:Baudolino
Create image

“I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history. ... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20... This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.”

ChristianTimeReligionHopeChristianityHistoryBibleCatholicScriptureCatholicismSecularApocalypseEnd Of The WorldSecularismRevelationHegelAugustineMarxChurch FathersHistoricismEnd Of The Time
Book:Belief or Nonbelief?
Create image

“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 ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.”

TruthTortureInquisition
Book:The Name of the Rose
Create image

“In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

MindBooksCommunicationLibraries
Book:The Name of the Rose
Create image

“If metaphors require an underlying cultural framework, then the heiroglyphhic language of the gods cannot be a merely primitive stage of human consciousness: it needs the presence of both the symbolic language of heroes and the epistolary language of me as its starting point. Thus Vico is not speaking of a linear development from a metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a continual, cyclical activity. The language of the gods is a heap of unrelated synedoches and metonymies…”

LanguageMetaphorSymbolsHeroesGodsLinguisticsSignsSemiotics
Book:Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
Create image

“No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer’s precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in. The success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects; encyclopedia. In this perspective, metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural framework, on the basis, that is, of a universe of content that is already organized into networks of interpretation, which decide semiotically) the identities and differences of properties.”

CultureLanguageMetaphorInterpretationLinguisticsAlgorithmSemioticsNetworks
Book:Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
Create image

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

ReadingLiteratureBooksWordsLibrary
Book:The Name of the Rose
Create image

“...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.”

BooksLibrarians
Book:The Name of the Rose
Create image

“È sciocco pensare di dover leggere tutti i libri che compri, come è sciocco criticare chi compra più libri di quanti ne potrà mai leggere. Sarebbe come dire che dovresti usare tutte le posate o occhiali, cacciaviti o punte da trapano acquistati prima di acquistarne di nuovi. Ci sono cose nella vita di cui abbiamo bisogno di avere sempre scorte in abbondanza, anche se ne utilizzeremo solo una piccola parte. Se, ad esempio, consideriamo i libri come una medicina, capiamo che è bene averne tanti in casa piuttosto che pochi: quando vuoi stare meglio, allora vai all’ “armadio dei medicinali” e scegli un libro, uno a caso, ma il libro giusto per quel momento. Ecco perché dovresti sempre avere una scelta nutriente ! Chi compra un solo libro, legge solo quello e poi se ne sbarazza. Applica semplicemente ai libri la mentalità consumistica, cioè li considera un prodotto di consumo, un bene. Chi ama i libri sa che un libro è tutt'altro che una merce.”

ReadingBooks
Author:Umberto Eco
Create image

“And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.' 'Master!' I said, shocked. 'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.' 'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!' 'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting.”

ChristianityHumour
Book:The Name of the Rose
Create image

“الفاشلون - شأنهم شأن العصاميّين - يملكون معارفَ أكثر من المُتفوّقين ، إذا كنتَ تريد أن تتفوَّق فعليك أن تعرف شيئًا بعينه ، دون إضاعة الوقت في معرفة كل شيء ؛ متعة المعرفة مخصّصة للفاشلين ، كلّما أكثرتَ مِن معرفة الأشياء ، سارت الأشياء في غير طريقها”

FailureFailure And Attitude
Book:Numero zero
Create image