110+ Umberto Eco Quotes On Books, Beauty And Philosophical

Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, literary critic, and philosopher. He is best known for his novel The Name of the Rose, which was made into a movie in 1986. Eco was also the author of several other novels, essays, and works of literary criticism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Umberto Eco on books, beauty, philosophical.

Top 10 Umberto Eco Quotes

1. Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
2. When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
3. 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.
4. Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
5. There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
6. I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
7. To survive, you must tell stories.
8. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
9. Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.
10. A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.

Umberto Eco Image Quotes

I love the smell of book ink in the morning. — Umberto Eco

To survive, you must tell stories. — Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Short Quotes

• Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
• What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
• The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
• For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.
• The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
• Translation is the art of failure.
• Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
• If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.
• Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom
• The real hero is always a hero by mistake.

Umberto Eco Quotes About Books

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. — Umberto Eco

You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing. — Umberto Eco

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. — Umberto Eco

libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands — Umberto Eco

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten. — Umberto Eco

We live for books. — Umberto Eco

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.... — Umberto Eco

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. — Umberto Eco

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. — Umberto Eco

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay. — Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Quotes About Beauty

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful. — Umberto Eco

the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. — Umberto Eco

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

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. — Umberto Eco

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country — Umberto Eco

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes? — Umberto Eco

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

Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty. — Umberto Eco

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked. — Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Quotes About Truth

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. — Umberto Eco

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. — Umberto Eco

I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside. — Umberto Eco

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all. — Umberto Eco

But now 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. — Umberto Eco

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. — Umberto Eco

The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came. — Umberto Eco

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

The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. — Umberto Eco

My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth. — Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Quotes About Book

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb. — Umberto Eco

Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence. — Umberto Eco

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer. — Umberto Eco

Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for. — Umberto Eco

I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of. — Umberto Eco

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks. — Umberto Eco

The good of a book lies in its being read. — Umberto Eco

Books always speak of other books. — Umberto Eco

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told. — Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Quotes About Love

The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell -- in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond. — Umberto Eco

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts? — Umberto Eco

I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species. — Umberto Eco

He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan. — Umberto Eco

Simple mechanisms do not love. — Umberto Eco

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed. — Umberto Eco

Love is wiser than wisdom. — Umberto Eco

Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity. — Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Quotes About Made

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. — Umberto Eco

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

...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies). — Umberto Eco

[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits. — Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Umberto Eco

I love the smell of book ink in the morning. — Umberto Eco

To survive, you must tell stories. — Umberto Eco

The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions. — Umberto Eco

Then why do you want to know?" "Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do. — Umberto Eco

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss. — Umberto Eco

My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before. — Umberto Eco

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. — Umberto Eco

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever. — Umberto Eco

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective. — Umberto Eco

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. — Umberto Eco

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn. — Umberto Eco

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner. — Umberto Eco

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. — Umberto Eco

You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus. — Umberto Eco

That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life. — Umberto Eco

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed. — Umberto Eco

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake. — Umberto Eco

You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you. — Umberto Eco

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating. — Umberto Eco

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. — Umberto Eco

The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad. — Umberto Eco

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. — Umberto Eco

A secret is powerful when it is empty. — Umberto Eco

Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation. — Umberto Eco

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity. — Umberto Eco

The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. — Umberto Eco

The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars. — Umberto Eco

I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul. — Umberto Eco

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error. — Umberto Eco

Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it. — Umberto Eco

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. — Umberto Eco

If Bush had read all the documents about the Russians and British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, he would have not done what he did in the 21st. He would have understood how difficult it was to control this territory. He probably didn't read them. — Umberto Eco

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams. — Umberto Eco

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility? — Umberto Eco

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. — Umberto Eco

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow. — Umberto Eco

I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot. — Umberto Eco

I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way. — Umberto Eco

There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics. — Umberto Eco

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

Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room. — Umberto Eco

A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars. — Umberto Eco

If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things. — Umberto Eco

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely. — Umberto Eco

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC — Umberto Eco

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ? — Umberto Eco

The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief. — Umberto Eco

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. — Umberto Eco

At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call to constantly into question the very tale we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning. — Umberto Eco

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. — Umberto Eco

And we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness and that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything. — Umberto Eco

Terrorism is a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the heroes underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise. — Umberto Eco

Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene. — Umberto Eco

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules. — Umberto Eco

Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want. — Umberto Eco

The hand of God creates; it does not conceal. — Umberto Eco

But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?" I asked, for no good reason. "Is Jorge right?" "Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . . — Umberto Eco

In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness. — Umberto Eco

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person. — Umberto Eco

Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. — Umberto Eco

The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us. — Umberto Eco

It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating. — Umberto Eco

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly. — Umberto Eco

The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea. — Umberto Eco

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed. — Umberto Eco

There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism. — Umberto Eco

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness. — Umberto Eco

That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity. — Umberto Eco

Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after. — Umberto Eco

The followers must feel besieged. — Umberto Eco

The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist. — Umberto Eco

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. 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. — Umberto Eco

Life Lessons by Umberto Eco

1. Umberto Eco encourages us to embrace complexity and ambiguity, and to always be open to new ideas and perspectives.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of different cultures and the power of storytelling.
3. Finally, Eco encourages us to be curious and to question the world around us, so that we can better understand our place in it.