“For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines -- some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege -- I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words...”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
“There are only four questions of importance in life: What is sacred, of what is the spirit made, what is worth living for, and what is worth dying for. The answer to all of them is the same. Only LOVE.”
― Umberto Eco
“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.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
“It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating ...”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened.
"Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
“Simple mechanisms do not love.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
“They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on.”
― Umberto Eco
“National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
“We'll have to see," Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. "Potio-section..." He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. "Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no," he said to Diotallevi. "It's not the department, it's a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They're all under the same heading of Tetrapyloctomy."
"What's tetra...?" I asked.
"The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless."
"All right, gentlemen," I said, "I give up. What are you two talking about?"
"Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given. The school's main is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“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, Foucault's Pendulum
“I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one's free to take it and run with it. At the end, they'll see who's done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much: Mark isn't bad, just a little sloppy: Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what's happening, it's too late, Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty....It all goes to Peter's head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens to tell the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of Patmos.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not one single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come from, these vortices of flame, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69)...For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car...It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart.”
― Umberto Eco, On Literature
“Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.”
― Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
“I asked him who had put into the crowd’s head the idea of attacking the Jews. Salvatore could not remember. I believe that when such crowds collect, lured by a promise and immediately demanding something, there is never any knowing who among them speaks.”
― 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
“The Void is not being, but not being cannot be, ergo the Void cannot be. The reasoning was sound, because it denied the Void while granting that it could be conceived. In fact, we can quite easily conceive things that do not exist. Can a chimera, buzzing in the Void, devour second intentions? No, because chimeras do not exist, in the Void no buzzing can be heard, and intentions are mental things -- an intended pear does not nourish us. And yet I can think of a chimera even if it is chimerical, namely, if it is not. And the same with the Void.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
“If you could decide on characters' destinies it would be like going to the desk of a travel agent who says: "So where do you want to find the whale, in Samoa or in the Aleutian Islands? And when? And do you want to be the one who kills it or let Queequeg do it? Whereas the real lesson of Moby-Dick is that the whale goes wherever it wants.”
― Umberto Eco, On Literature
“The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.”
― 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, The Name of the Rose
“They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and
hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because cats live by
their ability to smell, it can no longer recognize things. I’m a cat that hit
its nose.”
― Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
“Here he was holding the clear proof of the existence of other skies, but at the same time without having to ascend beyond the celestial spheres, for he intuited many worlds in a piece of coral. Was there any need to calculate the number of forms which the atoms of the Universe could create--burning at the stake all those who said their number was not finite--when it sufficed to meditate for years on one of these marine objects to realize how the deviation of a single atom, whether willed by God or prompted by Chance, could generate inconceivable Milky Ways?”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
“Here's a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
“He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.
Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
“...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, The Island of the Day Before
“There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.”
― Umberto Eco, On Literature
“... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.”
― Umberto Eco, Five Moral Pieces
“The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
― Umberto Eco
“I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion - which I could see he always harbored - that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
More at:
http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco
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