Umberto Eco: Trending quotes

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Umberto Eco: 240 quotes11 likes

“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

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“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 book The Island of the Day Before

Source: The Island of the Day Before

“I felt like poisoning a monk.”

Umberto Eco

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”

Umberto Eco

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“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 book Foucault's Pendulum

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

“But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.”

Umberto Eco book The Island of the Day Before

Source: The Island of the Day Before

“I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.”

Umberto Eco book Foucault's Pendulum

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

“Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.”

Umberto Eco book The Island of the Day Before

Source: The Island of the Day Before

“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 book The Prague Cemetery

Source: The Prague Cemetery

“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 book The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Source: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

“This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.”

Umberto Eco

Source: The Name of the Rose (Everyman's Library

“Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.”

Umberto Eco book The Prague Cemetery

Source: The Prague Cemetery

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

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

Variant: A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie.
Source: Trattato di semiotica generale (1975); [A Theory of Semiotics] (1976)

“Translation is the art of failure.”

Umberto Eco

“I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but
we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.”

Umberto Eco book Foucault's Pendulum

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

“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 book The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose (1980)

“We've got to help each other, seeing as God doesn't help us. Do you see how great Jesus' idea was? Imagine how much it must have irritated God. Forget the devil, Jesus was the only true enemy of God, and he's the only friend us poor wretches have.”

Umberto Eco book The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)

“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 book The Name of the Rose

William of Baskerville
The Name of the Rose (1980)