Umberto Eco Quotes

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.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
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.
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.
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 would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
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.
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
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.
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
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.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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.
Translation is the art of failure.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
A secret is powerful when it is empty.
A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
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.
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AuthorName
Umberto Eco
Profession
Novelist
BirthDate
05 January, 1932
DeathDate
19 February, 2016
Country
Italy
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