Umberto Eco: Trending quotes (page 5)

“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.”

“I felt like poisoning a monk.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Translation is the art of failure.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”