For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of “Is your novel an open work or not?” How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or “With which of your characters do you identify?” For God’s sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.

— Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Quotes

The prince of darkness is a gentleman. – Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv.

— Umberto Eco

Alamut could be reached only astride eagles.

— Umberto Eco

The Frenchman doesn’t really know what he wants, but knows perfectly well that he doesn’t want what he has. And the only way he knows of saying it is by singing songs.

— Umberto Eco

Jacopo seemed to have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in imagining absurd machines – only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented.

— Umberto Eco

The good of a book lies in it being read. A Book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in turn speak of things.

— Umberto Eco

Does it make sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convince yourself that you would have chosen the right one – had you had the Opportunity? I.

— Umberto Eco

I lost myself in the contemplation of nature, trying to forget my thoughts and to look only at beings as they appear, and to forget myself, joyfully, in the sight of them.

— Umberto Eco

Bauman notes that a typical feature of the interregnum, once the faith in salvation from above, from the state, or from revolution is gone, is indignation. Such indignation knows what it doesn’t want, but not what it does.

— Umberto Eco

If God existed, he would be a library.

— Umberto Eco

I sought peace in everything, but never was I happier than in a corner with a book.

— Umberto Eco

Amparo was conquered, and I felt a twinge of jealousy. I.

— Umberto Eco

Crecer en las sombras es el privilegio de quien se dispone a conquistar el mundo.

— Umberto Eco

Creo que, a ciertas alturas, ya no hay diferencia entre acostumbrarse a fingir que se cree y acostumbrarse a creer.

— Umberto Eco

Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.

— Umberto Eco

There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,” he said, “to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.

— Umberto Eco

Terrorism is not the enemy of the great systems; on the contrary, it is their natural counterweight, accepted, programmed.

— Umberto Eco

European identity, it seems, is only perceived by educated people. And that is sad, but it is a start.

— Umberto Eco

In a certain sense I could agree with the Futurists that war is the only hygiene of the world, except for one little correction: It would be, if only volunteers were allowed to wage it.

— Umberto Eco

They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on. Civilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen on the last priest, and the earth is rid of that evil lot.

— Umberto Eco

To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea, processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of gymnosophists – and so on, to infinity.

— Umberto Eco
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