Umberto Eco Quotes

"Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear."

"Translation is the art of failure."

"How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see."

"Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round."

"Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics."

"The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?"

"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."

"When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment."

"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."

"The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity."

"Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered."

"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."

"I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion."

"Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament."

"Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious."

"If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile."

"I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies."

"There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past."

"When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love."

"Beauty is boring because it is predictable."

"Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state."

"Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that."

"As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying."

"There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation."

"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."

"I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22."

"I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts."

"The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem."

"My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer."

"At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories."